Question: How do you start creating medicines?

Angela Stokes answered on 19 Nov 2014:

Hey smiley Face
What a great question…..we start off by looking at a disease, ie how do cells react and why and model on computers what happens if we can stop the cells doing it and what it would take to stop the cells doing it. Then we look through databases of literally millions of compounds to see whether there is something that has been looked at previously that will stop the problem – its like fitting a block in a hole to prevent another block fitting in the hole and reacting to give the effect we dont want.

We then start doing lots of testing and isolating the bit of the compound that is doing the work and produce a draft formulation…and from there we start testing.

It can take up to five years to get that far -so the imagine, you worked on one thing the whole time you were in senior school!