• Question: How are drugs made?

    Asked by anon-196552 to Sebastian, Paddy, Lee, Jennifer, Fiona, Eleanor on 1 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: Fiona Scott

      Fiona Scott answered on 1 Mar 2019:


      Drugs are generally made in a chemistry lab using organic chemistry techniques. Different chemical starting reagents are mixed together to form new products. Some drugs are easy to make requiring just a single reaction to transform a starting material. while others can take dozens of different reactions to get to the product you want. A lot of drugs are made manually by chemists but increasingly these processes are being done automatically by robots! Check out the Chemputer on YouTube. There are also other kinds of drugs that are not made in a chemistry lab.

    • Photo: Paddy Sudhakar

      Paddy Sudhakar answered on 1 Mar 2019:


      Drugs are made broadly made in two different ways – using synthetic chemistry which involves mixing multiple chemicals or using biological systems (like bacterial cells or mammalian cells) which produce the drug molecules for us. In either case, drugs needs to be purified and checked for quality before use.

    • Photo: Lee Steinberg

      Lee Steinberg answered on 2 Mar 2019:


      I’m not really a chemist in a laboratory, where we use reactions to create molecules. Instead, I work on a computer. Computers can help us make new drugs because we can use them to tell us the properties of a molecule before we make it – this means we don’t need to spend lots of money buying starting molecules, and lots of time waiting for them to react. This is actually becoming very common in drug-making companies, where the computational and laboratory chemists work together to make new drugs.

    • Photo: Jennifer Harris

      Jennifer Harris answered on 3 Mar 2019: last edited 3 Mar 2019 12:26 pm


      I can answer this in a slightly different way. I do not have a chemistry background, so the other answers given by the other scientists answer that question very well. What I can tell you is how we get a new treatment to patients. There are several steps to get a new treatment to patients:

      1. Research a disease: this is needed to help identify what goes wrong when someone has a disease or illness. This may identify a specific protein which a drug could then target.

      2. Research a specific drug-target: this is what the other scientists have already answered – the chemistry bit! This step involves taking the knowledge from Step 1, to target the thing that’s going wrong.

      3. Animal testing: Many new drugs have to be tested on animals to make sure they are safe and actually help stop the disease.

      4. Clinical trials: This involves asking volunteers from the public, to take a drug to test if it helps stop the disease and to make sure it’s also safe in humans. Sometimes, some people do not respond to that drug and it doesn’t make them better – this means that we now know not to give these people that drug. This produces a lot of data and information about how a patient feels, how the drug is metabolised in the body and how the disease changes.

      5. Regulation: In order for the NHS to treat patients every day with a new drug, “regulators” must look at the data and information from Step 4. If they are happy that patients benefit from the new drug and that it’s safe to take, they will approve it. This now means that the drug can be used to treat day-to-day patients. In the UK, this is the “Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA)” and the “The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE)”.

      6. Monitoring: This step happens after the drug is being given to patients every day, to be triple-sure that patients are safe.

      Across these 6 steps, there are many people and organisations involved:
      – Research scientists
      – Research doctors and nurses
      – Public volunteers (healthy people and patients)
      – Research Hospitals
      – Research Universities
      – Pharmaceutical Companies
      – Government
      – Regulators
      – Policy-makers

    • Photo: Sebastian Cosgrove

      Sebastian Cosgrove answered on 4 Mar 2019:


      The other scientists have given brilliant answers to this question already!

      One of the problems with making drugs is that after some time they can become non-effective, meaning that they don’t work in treating a certain disease. My old boss was coming up with new ways to try and solve this problem by inventing new chemical reactions to create completely new molecules that could interact with diseases in different ways to older drugs. Letting scientists be creative in the lab is one of the best ways that we can come up with things like new drugs or new science to treat disease! Remember, the discovery of antibiotics was an accident!

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