Where does medicine come from?

Where does medicine come from?

The challenge facing medicinal science is to fill the demand for new drugs. Despite technological advances, there are fewer new medicines approved every year. The task of getting a drug to your local pharmacy is complex, arduous, and frequently expensive. Therefore, pharmaceutical companies have established elaborate business models to research, develop, and produce molecules to treat diseases

Phase One: Drug Discovery

Drug discovery relies on the collaborative efforts of researchers including chemists, biologists, and physicians

Phase 2- Clinical Trials

These are the stage of drug development where a drug’s effect on humans is tested.

Challenges Going Forward

As new technologies in genetics and disease identification become available, our understanding of the molecular basis for diseases will improve

Drug Discovery: Natural Products

Historically, medicines were administered in the form of herbal concoctions, and many traditional medicines continue to be taken this way.

References:

Corey, E. J., Czakó, B., & Kürti, L. (2001) Experimental and computational approaches to estimate solubility and permeability in drug discovery and development settings. Chem. Del. Rev. 46:3-26.

Drug Discovery: High-Throughput Screening

Robots use robots to mix miniscule amounts of potential drugs with tiny samples of the drug target.

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