BIOM20002 Lecture Notes - Lecture 70: Rauvolfia, Reserpine, Drug Discovery
Document Summary
Viable therapeutic area: room in the market for drug. However: maybe targeting one pathway isn"t good enough to stop complexdisease. Maybe drug requires a high conc to take effect. Maybe drug cleared too rapidly or not absorbed well enough. e. g. you may find you need to take drug every hour. Problems with selectivity, replacement by other drugs, toxicity or pharmacokinetics means the drug is finished as a therapeutic. However these drugs useful for understanding and further development of drug discovery process. Drugs as pathway blockers/activators: block/change it and see what the effect is. Selectivity is key: if you use a gene deletion technique which knocks off a lot of genes (or. Selectivity is key: if you use a gene deletion technique which knocks off a lot of genes (or a drug that has many targets), then it is hard to attribute one gene to a particular effect.
