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Asked by samantha to Anne, Carolyn, Joe, Mariana, Nick on 18 Mar 2010 in Categories: About.
Question: I have to know about drug discovery for my A Level course. Do you have any experience in drug discovery?
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Nick Bradshaw answered on 18 Mar 2010:
Not really I’m afraid. Currently we are studying a group of proteins which might be good “targets” for new schziophrenia drugs, however we are quite a way starting to develop anything yet.
As I understand it, most development at the moment comes from drug companies who have “libraries” of thousands of chemicals which they then test in order to find one that appears to do what they want. They then use that as a starting point and try changing individual atoms of the drug to see if they can improve on it.
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Anne Seawright answered on 18 Mar 2010:
No sorry. I will be looking at doing a drugs trial for a new drug to decrease stress in dogs but I wasn’t involved in its discovery.
Good luck 🙂
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Mariana Vargas answered on 18 Mar 2010:
Hello there! No, I don’t have experience in drug discovery myself. But I have worked with many molecules that are considered “targets” for many drugs. I have worked with some receptors in the brain called “NMDA”, they are common targets for drugs used in Parkinson’s disease, and at the moment I am working on three molecules called abeta, tau and GSK3 which are targets for drug discovery in the area of Alzheimer’s disease.
A friend of mine used to work in a company where they would screen many already approved drugs to test whether they can treat more conditions than the ones they were already approved for, this screening was done using zebra fish with distinct mutations which served as “disease models”. -
Carolyn McGettigan answered on 18 Mar 2010:
Not directly, but when I was doing by undergraduate degree I did work for 3 months at a drug company. I worked in a Pharmacology lab where they were doing experiments investigating neural targets for the treatment of migraine pain. I did a lot of experiments testing for a specific type of 5-HT (serotonin) receptor in rat brainstem, using staining techniques to pick out where the receptors were located. The day-to-day work wasn’t very exciting – lots of lifting things out of one solution and dipping them in another, but it did feel good to be working on something with direct medical relevance.
When I applied for degree courses there was a cool 5-year MSc programme at Imperial College in Medicinal Chemistry. I ended up doing Natural Sciences at Cambridge but I still wonder where I would be now if I’d gone to Imperial instead. At the time I really loved Chemistry and wanted to work on pharmacological applications so that course seemed perfect.
Comments
Moderator - Sian commented on :
That’s fascinating – imagine going to a chemical library! I wonder if you’d have to be quiet in there? 🙂
modshamini commented on :
When it comes to recreational drugs the story of how they discovered LSD is a good one – a scientist called Albert Hoffman accidentally got some of it on his skin when he was studying it and started feeling ill and hallucinating. He then tried to cycle home – which was quite a bad idea. Fortunately he didn’t crash, and he had accidentally discovered a new drug!
modshamini commented on :
Penicillin was discovered by accident too! Fortunately it’s not as dangerous as LSD…unless you’re a bacterium.
Joe commented on :
Drug discovery is a crazy topic — for each success story there are impressive failures. Back in the 1970s a guy named Barry Kidston was trying to synthesize a version of LSD for recreational uses but by mistake he made 1-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine (catchy name! Let’s call is MPTP). Anyway, MPTP is a rather impressive neurotoxin in that it kills brains cells in the substania nigra that produce dopamine. Unfortunately for him (and some folks in California who used it afterwards), that’s exactly what happens in Parkinson’s disease. So all of a sudden, these hippy drug users who were young were suddenly severely Parkinsonian. Bummer, eh?
But wait — there is a positive side to this. Before 1976 when Barry decided to be a drug inventor, it was incredibly difficult to study Parkinson’s disease because there was no known animal model — it was a strictly human disease. With the discovery of MPTP it became possible to make Parkinsonian primates (but not rats or mice, oddly) and they are now used to study the disease in addition to the patient studies in humans when Parkinson’s occurs naturally.