(28th-January-2020)
It is easy to understand why a drug works because it can be said that the molecule responsible for the disease is the “keyhole” and the compound that enters it is the “key”.
Cimetidine was developed in the United Kingdom in 1975 and is a pioneering drug created with the policy of "closing the keyhole". Many medicines made before that are actually blocking the keyhole. Most medicines are currently designed with the policy of "blocking the keyhole". First, we clarified the molecules that cause the disease (① determination of the target), but it was not created to aim for it. ), Search for a compound that binds to it (1) search for a hit compound, and if a compound is found, change its structure little by little to improve its efficacy, stability, safety, etc. (③) Optimization of lead compounds).
Drug development process
It is said that developing one drug costs 11 to 15 years and costs about 100 billion yen. After the lead compound has been optimized, tests on animals and humans are performed.
Traditionally, drug design has been performed by experiments using cells and animals, but in the 1970s, methods of calculating molecular shapes and bonds in computers advanced, and from the 1980s on, these drugs were converted to drugs. In the 1990s, the drug glaucoma treatment “Dolzolamide” (1994) was used as an example in the early stages of development using the power of calculation. And the influenza drug Zanamivir (licensed in the United States in 1999).
When the human genome was deciphered in 2003, the causative molecule of the disease was identified based on the genome, and the shape of the causative molecule became easier to examine. Today, computation has become an essential technology for drug development.
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