Drug Development and Testing

• Microorganisms and plants have evolved to produce substances that can kill pathogens, which means that instead of having to develop all of our drugs from scratch, we can take these substances from them and either use them directly as medicines or modify them in a lab and then use them as medicines.
• Aspirin, a common painkiller, was originally developed from a chemical found in the bark of willow trees.
• Digitalis, used to treat heart problems like heart failure, was originally developed from a chemical found in fox gloves.
• Penicillin, the first and most widely used antibiotic, was originally developed from a fungus known as penicillium.
• When testing new drugs, efficacy, toxicity, and dosage are the three main things to consider.
• Efficacy in drug testing is how well the drug works, for example, how good is an antibiotic at killing bacteria or how well does a pain relief medication reduce your pain.
• Toxicity in drug testing is how harmful the drug is, for example, does it damage our cells or have any side effects.
• Dosage in drug testing refers to how much of the drug or what concentration of the drug should be given.
• The more drug we give, the more effective it's going to be but it will also cause more side effects.
• The first stage of drug testing involves testing the substance on human cells and tissues which can be grown in a laboratory.
• The first stage of drug development involves testing the substance on animals, such as mice and rabbits, to determine its efficacy and toxicity.
• The second stage of drug development involves testing the substance on healthy volunteers, starting with a low dose to check for any side effects, and then slowly increasing the dose until the maximum dosage is found.
• The final stage of drug development involves giving the drug to people suffering from the particular illness that the drug is trying to target, and slowly increasing the dose until the optimum dosage is found.
• Clinical trials should be blind and use a placebo, a substance that is just like the real drug but doesn't actually do anything.
• The most common technique for clinical trials is to give half of the volunteers the real drug and the other half of them the placebo, but it's important that neither the doctors nor the volunteers know which drugs have been taken by whom until all the results have been analyzed at the end of the study.
• The purpose of all of the blind double-blind stuff is to avoid any unconscious bias, for example, if the volunteers knew that they were taking the drug they might be more likely to report any side effects and their doctors might be more likely to notice them.
• Once all the drug testing is complete, the results are written up and peer-reviewed by other scientists to ensure that the tests involved were fair.
• The rigorous analysis by other scientists is central to all of science and it helps to prevent any false claims or results from getting published.
• The benefit of testing on human cells and tissues is that it's easy and cheap to test tons of different substances.
• The downside of testing on human cells and tissues is that it doesn't really tell as much about how the substance would affect an entire organism or even how it would affect a specific organ.