
Discovering new medicines is as much about culture as science - luu
http://www.thenational.ae/thenationalconversation/comment/discovering-new-medicines-is-as-much-about-culture-as-science
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jostmey
Drug discovery is perhaps the hardest intellectual problem. The human body is
extraordinarily complicated --- perhaps more complicated than it needs to be
to function, but that is another discussion. And yet great minds have found
ways to fix it at a molecular level when it fails. I am in awe of the
scientists who have invented the cures that we take for granted today. And yet
so much remains to be done. Today, only a handful of treatments exist for the
countless ailments that strike us down dead.

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kijin
Drug discovery in the academia works very differently from drug discovery in
the pharmaceutical industry (the companies that actually profit from selling
drugs).

Have you ever wondered how people find out the exact combination of
complicated molecules (tri-ethyl bi-methyl chloro fluoro benzo whatever) that
help treat a specific disease? That's like finding the proverbial needle in a
gigantic haystack...

Unless you have the money and equipment to perform a brute-force attack.

My professor once described to me one of the methods that drug companies use
to come up with new drugs. I forgot a lot of the details, but the basic idea
is that they keep an eye on medical journals for newly discovered receptors
(the part of a cell that molecules can bind to), and then throw every
plausible combination of molecules at that receptor until they find one that
sticks. If the one that sticks the best happens to be patented by someone
else, you just keep throwing similar molecules until you find the one that
sticks the second best.

Large pharmaceutical companies can pull this off because they keep a huge
repertoire of all sorts of molecules that are utterly useless at the moment
but might stick to some receptor that has yet to be discovered. It really is a
kind of brute-force attack, aided by the biochemical equivalent of a rainbow
table. Apparently, this method works.

