化学・薬学の英語：創薬

新しい薬をつくるプロセス、「創薬」について、聞いたことはあるでしょうか。現代は、人間だけでなく、コンピューターの力も使って、創薬は行われているそうです。薬学に関心のある方や、製薬会社を狙う方は、読んでみてもよいと思います。

◆英単語、表現
metabolic stability : 代謝安定性

A: Hey B, have you heard of drug discovery?

B: Yes, drug discovery is the process of discovering new medications through various methods.

A: That's right. Historically, drugs were discovered by identifying the active ingredient from traditional remedies or by serendipitous discovery, but nowadays, it's a more complex process.

B: Yes, drug discovery involves identifying screening hits, medicinal chemistry, and optimizing those hits to increase affinity, selectivity, efficacy, potency, metabolic stability, and oral bioavailability.

A: Exactly. And once a compound that fulfills all of these requirements has been identified, the process of drug development can continue.

B: I've heard that drug discovery is a capital-intensive process that involves large investments by pharmaceutical industry corporations as well as national governments.

A: Yes, and despite advances in technology and understanding of biological systems, drug discovery is still a lengthy, expensive, difficult, and inefficient process with a low rate of new therapeutic discovery.

B: I see. And I also know that discovering drugs that may be a commercial success or a public health success involves a complex interaction between investors, industry, academia, patent laws, regulatory exclusivity, marketing, and the need to balance secrecy with communication.

A: That's right. And the process of finding a new drug against a chosen target for a particular disease usually involves high-throughput screening, wherein large libraries of chemicals are tested for their ability to modify the target.

B: And another function of high-throughput screening is to show how selective the compounds are for the chosen target, as one wants to find a molecule which will interfere with only the chosen target, but not other, related targets.

A: Yes, cross-screening is also useful because the more unrelated targets a compound hits, the more likely that off-target toxicity will occur with that compound once it reaches the clinic.

B: It sounds like drug discovery is a complex process that involves many steps and factors.

A: Definitely. But if successful, clinical trials can be developed, and drugs can be approved for use.