Human patient simulation in pharmacology graduate education: bridging the bench-to-bedside gap.

T National Institutes of Health roadmap for medical research places great emphasis on translational medicine. Nonetheless, it remains a difficult proposition for PhD scientists trained to study intracellular and molecular mechanisms to appreciate the bigger picture of how their work relates to human systems biology. This difficulty is compounded by the disparate educational curricula that separate graduate students from medical students, with graduate students rarely experiencing the clinical environment. In effort to expose our PhD graduate students to integrated aspects of human physiology and contextualize drug utilization, we report the use of human patient simulation in our pharmacology curriculum.