Just my initial thoughts.

Hi everyone, so I am sitting at my apartment and I have been thinking about what to post for the blog. I know Dr. Beleh told us that this is for us to carry on a conversation and discuss what we think and/or feel or have learned about drug discovery. Well I didn't want to come empty handed so I tried doing some research. I came across this great list of medications that have been FDA approved in the last 10 years (Clarithromycin was approved in 1995!).

http://www.centerwatch.com/drug-information/fda-approved-drugs/year/2015

So, my friend has Crohn's disease and has tried every therapy under the sun, he can't handle the side effects of the medications. With this list I found a medication which he is going to start therapy with in the coming weeks, (let's hope this works) vedolizumab. So I found the medication on the list and it has a complete drug over view along with summaries of the clinical trials for Ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease, but there is no information on the "drug" and where it came from. I then went to the drugs website and still could not find where the drug "came from" in essence it's history/discovery. I have finally found some... information on the identification of anti-alpha4beta7 integrin found in the intestinal tract which most likely lead to the development of vedolizumab, but this article was published in 2001 and the earliest articles I can find of vedolizumab is in 2009. Why is there such a large gap and why can I not find the development and discovery process of this medication? I am sure I am not using the correct 'searching terms'.

I guess I went on a tangent, but I would like to know the processes in which this drug was made, discovered, modified to be a contender in the therapy of Crohn's disease. I guess researching drug discoveries is more difficult then I intended.

Rikki