Drug discovery
Very interesting comment over on
Derek Lowe's website:
bq. I have a weird job. I feel safe in saying that, not least because I'm supposed to discover a drug that can be sold to sick customers, and I haven't even come close to doing that in fifteen years of work. (No, it's not just me.) Another thing that makes me sure that my line of work is abnormal is that
nothing I've ever worked on has ever quite gone the way I thought it was going to.
bq. For instance: we make a compound, and it works in the first assay - it binds tightly to the protein target. Then it works in living cells, so we make more of it and we put it into mice. And it works there - not wonderfully, not really good enough yet, but enough to show that we're on the right track. So we go back and start changing the structure of the compound and making new analogs, which is the whole point of a medicinal chemist's job. You try to find something better.
He continues talking about the give and take of developing something that looks promising and then having it fail at some point. Derek then closes with this pithy comment:
bq. This is why I roll my eyes when I come across moonbat conspiracy theories about how the drug companies have all these secret cures that we're sitting on, see. . .hah. Secret cures, my colon. Some days we go home unsure if we're capable of boiling an egg.
Heh...
Posted by DaveH at August 12, 2004 11:02 PM