The Department of Pharmaceutical Biotechnology at MCOPS Manipal has excellent infrastructure, state-of-art laboratories, faculty specialized in Pharmaceutical Biotechnology.

The Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at MCOPS Manipal interacts with industries and government organisations like CDRI Lucknow, IICT Hyderabad for providing training to the postgraduate students.

The Department of Pharmaceutical Quality Assurance at Manipal College of Pharmaceutical Sciences (MCOPS) is the only department in India, with high end sophisticated analytical instruments.

The Department of Pharmaceutics, established in 1970 in MCOPS, has two MPharm specializations viz., Pharmaceutics and Industrial Pharmacy. The department is equipped with the state of art laboratories, ultra-modern facilities, and competent staff which have been considered as the most sophisticated infrastructure in the country. 

The Department of Pharmacognosy at MCOPS was established in 1971. It aims to have a broad background and gain an understanding of new developments that come to the fore, such as combinatorial biosynthesis, genomics and proteomics.

The Department of Pharmacology, catering to the pharmacy students, started in 1965 in Kasturba Medical College. Eminent medical pharmacologists like Dr. V K Bopardikar, Dr. M N Guruswami and Dr. Druva Ranganath Kulkarni were the first three heads of that department. After they retired, the baton passed on to younger teachers – Dr. Ahalya Devi, Dr. Sudhakara Karanth and Dr. K Laxminarayana Bairy. Teachers with M Pharm and M Sc qualifications were also in the staff of the department. It was left to them to handle diploma and B Pharm programmes. The senior teachers supervised M Pharm and PhD. M Pharm in pharmacology was started in 1971 and Mr. Kiran Shankar (Vice President, Marketing, Wintac, Bangalore) was the first student who secured M Pharm in pharmacology. Manipal College of Pharmaceutical Sciences got its full-fledged, independent pharmacology department on 1 November 2001 by transferring faculty hitherto associated with pharmacy programmes from KMC Pharmacology Department. Dr Ravindranath Shanbhag was the first to head the new department. The present principal of MCOPS, Dr C Mallikarjuna Rao, succeeded Dr. Shanbhag, and was at the helm for 10 years. From 2014 onwards, Dr. K Sreedhar R Pai has been the head of the department. The department has grown in men and materials- faculty and infrastructure since it moved to MCOPS. The ten faculty members all are doctorate degree holders. The department also has a supporting staff of seven. Currently, there are ten full-time research scholars pursuing their PhD. Now housed in spacious four-storeyed building, the department has three big laboratories, a cell culture lab, library, air-conditioned seminar and instrument rooms, faculty rooms and office room. The three big labs, named after former illustrious professors, Bopardikar, Guruswami and Kulkarni, are used for B Pharm, M Pharm I practical and M Pharm II research. Besides facilities for isolated tissue and simple in vivo experiments, these labs have premier instruments for several drug evaluation procedures. Just to name a few: Ugo Basile plethysmometer, analgesimeter, Hargreaves apparatus, Power Lab and so on. The instrument room has some of the sophisticated, state-of-art instruments, mainly acquired through grants secured from funding agencies by faculty. The flow cytometer, HPLC, fluorescent microscope, inverted microscope, UV spectrophotometer, ELISA plate reader, gel documentation system, Trans Blot (for Western Blot) and CO2 incubator are some of the notable instruments that support high quality research work. B Pharm students have pharmacology in the third and final years of their four-year programme. For Pharm D, pharmacology is taught in the second and third years. The Department of Pharmacology is handling physiology for first year B Pharm and Pharm D students.

The Department of Pharmacy Management at MCOPS was established in 2001 and offers programs in BPharm, MPharm, PharmD and PhD. It has interactions with University of Brighton, Hibernia College and School of Pharmacy, The University of Mississippi.

Department of Pharmacy Practice - MCOPS Manipal