Week 1 Post 1

Post 1 week 1 Pre-regulatory Drugs

-First use of medicine goes back 5000 years with an herbal tea which turns out to have Ephedrine, a stimulant and anti cough medicine.
-Ephedrine is an Alkaloid which means it comes from nature, has a basic Nitrogen atom, and some complexity
-The Pharmacophore of Ephedrine is Phenethylamine which means it has a benzene ring, a two carbon bridge, and a Nitrogen atom.
-Pharmacophore is the division of drugs into their most basic structure
-Pseudoephedrine (Sudafed) is another example of a phenethylamine, along with Methamphetamine and fenfluramine.
-Fenfluamine was a diet pill because all phenethylamines make you feel like you have energy without having to eat, however also caused heart damage
-Adverse Effects are effects of something that are worse then what you are trying to cure and would cause someone to not want to take the drug
-Side effects are other things that could happen that would only at most be a minor inconvenience
-Off label usage is when a doctor prescribes a drug not for the approved or tested reason. this is very common. For example a drug that helps with extreme nausea in cancer patients, is often prescribed to pregnant women in the first trimester.
-The first synthesized compounds were made in the 1890's, and these were things like dyes
-Paul Ehrlich discovered some dyes can target one kind of cell and not some others, which he thought he could use to make a drug that had a similar effect.
-Arsenicals are drugs with an atom of arsenic in them (also discovered by Ehrlich). They are an early drug class, which were considerably toxic however is used to treat syphilis because it doesn't do damage to the host.
-in the 1920's Domagk liked Ehrlichs work with dyes and found a red dye called Prontosil Rubrum that was a very potent antibiotic and worked on a range of bacteria
-it was used so much during WW2 that almost all bacteria have a resistance to it
-it was also found itself to not have any antibiotic capabilities. however when it gets into the body it undergoes a reaction that makes it active. This is called a Prodrug
-Sulfa drugs are another early drug class named after the SO2N group and they also usually have a benzene ring and an N at the other side of the ring. Most bacteria are resistant to this but a few are sometimes still used.
-once chemistry could get to synthetic drugs, a new world had opened. You can now change drugs or make new ones, and you can alter a drugs formation
-two parts of a drug: the drug substance which is what you think of when you think of a drug, and then there is the drug product, which holds the drug in place. for example, a pill has the drug and then the chalky stuff that makes the rest of the pill
-if you change both, you can really change how drug affects the body
-when this began, the FDA didn't exist. which caused a Wild West of chemistry as new things were being discovered which couldn't be well kept track of by the Bureau of chemistry nobody was really enforcing the safety
-Tis caused the Elixer Sulfanilamide Tragedy ehich was a company who wanted to add a sweet flavor to the antibiotic to sell better for children. they found diethylene glycol. this was a good solvent for the antibiotic and it made a clear soulution and was thick so ideal for putting on a spoon for kids. so they shipped it out. Lots of kids died because of ethylene glycol as its toxic. no requirement to test drugs then
-this caused the creation of the FDA
-Medicine is always evolving, so complete safty can never be ensured
-Also internatyional regulation differences can be a barrier to complete drug safety
-ALso fraud. when you deal with peopke you risk fraud
-lastly drug discovery is research and in research you can never control ALL the variables
-

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