Drug Discovery and the future of pharmaceuticals

Hi Everybody in MC617!

Just to share a couple of my thoughts on the history of drug discovery, it seems that humanity has always had a desire to seek out medicinal plants and plant extracts to cure physical and psychological ailments that have afflicted those individuals and their community members. Most likely, this type of behavior has been ongoing long before the earliest records of the first human civilizations. Beginning with plant-based medicines, and stretching through the serendipitous discovery and identification of major breakthrough drugs such as penicillin, and finally arriving where we are today with sophisticated high-throughput screening, semi-synthetic, and full synthetic methods to create and identify the most effective molecules, I find that the history of drug discovery is quite fascinating and has adapted to many challenges the health care system has faced as it has grown and transformed along with the world-wide, highly integrated society that we all live in today.

Building on this idea, I think that the pharmaceutical industry, medicinal chemists, and overall the field of drug discovery will have to capitalize on new bio-medical research and technology that is arriving at rapid pace. One idea that is already being seriously developed and utilized to improve patient outcomes is the personalization of drug therapy with pharmacogenomics. Being able to determine what drugs will work best for a particular medical problem, based on the genetics of the patient or the infectious organism, is a logical next step for the health care system to not only have more effective treatments for disease, but also the potential for reduced costs, and decreasing the chances of microorganism resistance to antimicrobial drugs.

The other area of drug discovery and formulation that I find incredibly fascinating is the area of gene therapy, with the potential to be approached from many different angles. First, the idea of virotherapy and virosomes which have, to me, a seemingly infinite potential for targeting specific cell types, such as oncolytic viruses, and viral vectors for gene therapy to introduce copies of genes that are mutated or missing in individuals with genetic disease. Another potentially incredible method of gene therapy is the utilization of siRNA or short-interfering RNA and the RNA interference pathway to modify DNA expression. Obviously these sorts of bio-regulatory pathways are poorly understood, so there needs to be an outpouring of breakthrough research before these can be developed into widely-available treatments that can have a real impact on individual healthcare; however with the exponential growth of biomedical technology I don't think the idea is so far-fetched that we will see this technology being utilized within our lifetimes.

My thoughts on drug discovery

I am trying to make this post as casual as possible! So here it goes:

Before entering this class, I knew the basic gist of what went into discovering a new drug based on prior classes we have taken or just when doing research on my own. However I did not know how much of drug discovery and the amount of common medications we use (especially very important ones) were spontaneously found. Many scientists back in the day discovered drugs by accident when treating a patient for a completely different ailment, which is a great thing because that’s how the first antibiotic (penicillin was discovered). I am actually very interested in researching more about serendipitous drugs and what they originally were used for and how they came to be a standard care of therapy for many diseases.

Another thing I wanted to talk about was about herbal medicine. I have never been a fan of using herbal medications or recommending them to others because I never thought they were actually useful. But, the truth is I never really gave them a chance.  I assumed that if it did work for people, it was ones that heard about it working from a friend and because of the amazing placebo effect, it also worked from them as well. However after thinking about it some more always be the case. For example, when researching about Echinacea and the origins of it I found out it was originally used by the Native Americans for multiple different reasons including for snakebites, fever, and general pain. They had no expectation as to what this herb would do for them but they just tried it out and it happened to help them with these symptoms. So in conclusion, I have a better understanding of herbal medications and though I do not believe they are the end-all be-all cure for everything, I am at least more willing to give them a chance because maybe, just maybe, they actually can be useful.

If you have any opinions regarding either of these topics, whether you agree or disagree or want to bring up a whole different point, please share!!

Thoughts about discovery

Hello everyone!

I have a few thoughts/topics that I wanted to post, but didn't want to make it too text-heavy (a little break from reading lots of text, phew), so here they are below in a numbered list:


1. This is related to the herbal medicines topic we just finished -- I always think about the striking difference between the United States and other countries in the types of medications used to treat different health conditions, mainly pills versus herbs. Having grown up in a household that speaks Chinese, it's also really interesting to see how there are certain words for health conditions that don't exactly translate (linguistically and as a defined health problem). Do any of you speak a different language and notice this happening?


From this topic I learned that people rely on case reports and word-of-the-mouth to determine unofficially the efficacy of the herbal, and was surprised to see the astounding lack of data on these herbals that are used probably regularly by many people. What's another herbal that we didn't talk about in class that you know a lot of people use, even though there's not a lot of studies on it?


2. I'm still so surprised that early researchers were able to synthesize new compounds or analogues without using the technology that we have now such as NMR and x-ray crystallography. If this were a movie, I wonder what someone from the past would say if he/she saw the technology that we have now. If you could go back in time and take a machine with you, what would you take and why?


3. It's amazing to see the work that Elion and other researchers accomplished. I always feel like there has been so much research done already, yet of course there are new medications coming out all the time. I also learned about how each new medication gets approved because it should have some sort of advantage to it.


Would enjoy hearing your thoughts on these topics!

Discovering what i don't know about drug discovery :)

As ubiquitous as medications and pharmaceutical products have become, it is not unexpected that the majority of the general population have an oversimplified perception about how medications are developed. What is surprising is how most healthcare professionals including some pharmacists have insufficient exposure to the intricate and elaborate process required for an idea to morph into a product that is then refined, repeatedly tested and eventually released as a medication. Even as a pharmacy student at one of the top pharmacy colleges in the United States, my understanding of the process remains limited but has been significantly enhanced by the series of lectures we have had as part of the “Exploring Pharmacy” elective. Although there have been many highlights from this course so far, two specific topics are most interesting to me.

In his lecture, “Drug Discovery and Drug Design”, Dr. Beleh efficiently portrayed the effort involved in the development of drugs. Regardless of whether the initial product was extracted from a natural source or synthesized in a laboratory, our ability to redesign the product - by improving its ability to cross the blood brain barrier, or adding a moiety to make it more selective for a specific action, amongst other examples – is not only evidence for the effort and time needed to manufacture the most effective and safest medication but as interesting is one of the many steps needed to deliver the final form of the drug to the patient. I can imagine how going through the process of testing the medication in animals and then clinical trials and obtaining the approval of the governing drug administrations such as the FDA can be as involved and complicated. Moreover, his talk indirectly triggered my interest in how the concept of targeted therapy has evolved with our profession and has continued in our current era to progress from treatments that have a specific organ target to those that target a gene in a specific cell of a specific organ.

On the other hand, our session about herbal supplements highlighted the misconception that most healthcare providers have. Pharmacists that I interviewed were skeptical about herbal products. Although it is important to be careful when examining these products, it is surprising to me how practicing pharmacists have scarce knowledge about the large body of research addressing these products. It was eye opening to listen to Dr. Shimp’s presentation. It simply underlines an area of deficiency that many healthcare providers need to address. I think that as long as pharmacists lack sufficient knowledge about these two topics, the rest of the health care profession and as importantly the general population will continue to have misconceptions. So how can we work on getting better? How can I be as knowledgeable about herbal products as I should about prescription medications.

Souhad Bazzi

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