• Question: In your opinion, what would be the greatest breakthrough in medical science within the next 3 years?

    Asked by anon-196305 to Sebastian, Paddy, Lee, Jennifer, Fiona, Eleanor on 7 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: Sebastian Cosgrove

      Sebastian Cosgrove answered on 7 Mar 2019:

      A lot of chemists are working on targeted delivery of drugs. This means using special techniques to make sure that a treatment will only treat the part of the body that is affected by a certain disease. If you think about cancer treatment and chemo-/radiotherapy, people get very unwell when we treat them and this is because the treatments are not selective at all so kills lots of other parts of peoples bodies and immune systems. Being able to deliver powerful drugs by encapsulating them for example would mean you could treat diseases like cancer, without any of the severe side effects.

    • Photo: Fiona Scott

      Fiona Scott answered on 7 Mar 2019:

      Quite recently PROTAC drugs have started to be tested on patients. PROTAC drugs work by tagging and breaking down desired enzymes/proteins entirely instead of just plugging them with a conventional drug molecule so if these prove to be successful PROTACs will allow us to treat diseases that were previously thought to be untreatable by conventional drug methods.

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