Week 11 Post 2

When discovering drugs, a large drug corporation will have a library of molecules to test against the target protein. These drug libraries are huge, with millions of molecules.The initial test are exclusively to find the molecules that best bind to the protein. This can be anywhere from 0.1%-10% of the drugs tested. then these "hits" are tested for toxicity, patents, and many other things before they can be patented themselves. Most drugs are about 20-25 non hydrogen atoms. That is a lot of combinations and to effectively search through all those atoms requires a large drug company. The newer drug companies and universities don't have the huge libraries to search through. they use the fragment method. This method requires a much smaller library, as the goal is to find two molecules that have a somewhat high activity constant, and fit into the binding sites on the target protein. these two molecules are then fused together to make a proper sized drug.

The drug libraries and the search for hits are at the very beginning of  the process of drug discovery. In the path from idea to market, Drug libraries are the molecules that your chemists have made that are tested to find hits, and are retested every time you pick a new target protein.

Comments

  1. Ms. DunleyJanuary 17, 2018 at 1:07 PM

    Can you explain the importance of the drugs being non-hydrogen atoms?

    ReplyDelete

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