• Question: How do you feel drugs will develop in the future? Please elaborate on the subject! thx for the chat!

    Asked by coca cola :-) to Angela, Sarah on 19 Nov 2014. This question was also asked by Melon.
    • Photo: Sarah Harris

      Sarah Harris answered on 19 Nov 2014:

      I think drugs will develop in a similar way that they do now – by identifying the causes of disease and symptoms and creating drugs to rectify these. I think we’ll move more towards drugs that act on multiple receptors, rather than just one, to eliminate side effects and also at developing drugs for specific phenotypes – so Cystic Fibrosis, for example, can be caused by mutations in several different genes and a drug has been developed that only works on one of these mutations, but that’s still one more than before – so medicine becomes more personalised.

      They’re also working towards using less animals in drug development, so I think there may be an element of using alternate systems in the future, although I think they will always need to use some animals to study the effects of new drugs in whole body systems.

      Finally (this is getting quite long, sorry!), drugs take a very long time from discovery to market – about 10 to 15 years, so I reckon there’ll be a way to reduce this so people can use new treatments more quickly.

    • Photo: Angela Stokes

      Angela Stokes answered on 19 Nov 2014:

      On top of what Sarah has said, I think we will make many more targeted therapies that act only on the disease and so have very few side effects. Things like monoclonal antibodies which attach themselve to a particular cell (we call this targeting) and the body then sees the antibody as a foreign agent and destroys it as it would any other foreign body, but at the same time it destroys the problem cell it is attached to.

      There are plans to make licensing quicker by allowing access to experimental drugs and by allowing drugs to come on the market with less data, especially for thiose patients where there is no other treatment.

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