Many departments and institutes have been established since 1984, when National Cheng Kung University College of Medicine was founded. Due to the concern on over supply of pharmacy graduates, pharmacy school had never been considered during the planning of the College. When the affiliated Medical Center was started in 1988, pharmaceutical service required not only the product delivery but also a patient-oriented process of drug therapy. However, no clinically oriented pharmacy program was available nationwide at that time, and all the pharmacy graduates were trained under traditional programs.Therefore, the faculty of the Department of Pharmacology advocated the implementation of a master program on clinical pharmacy, which led to the establishment of the Institute of Clinical Pharmacy in 1991. Before its approval by the Ministry of Education, a consultative conference was held to integrate the comments and suggestions from academy of pharmaceutical sciences, health administrations, as well as pharmacy practitioners from hospitals. The first class of graduate students was admitted in August 1993, and Professor Ming-Liang Lai was appointed as Founding Chair. Since 1996, the programs in the Institute of Clinical Pharmacy were expanded to incorporate the pharmacokinetics division in addition to the hospital pharmacy division. A fellowship program, designed as one to two years of full-time training, was started in 2002. The Institute of Biopharmaceutical Sciences was proposed in association with the Institute of Clinical Medicine, the Department of Biochemistry and the Department of Pharmacology, and the first Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) student will be admitted during 2003-04 academic year.