The New Medicines

This week I was not able to do any work in the lab because I have been in San Antonio and Seattle to visit possible colleges. Although I was not able to run another Western Blot, I was able to read more of The New Medicines by Bernice Schacter.

In The New Medicines, I read about the drug discovery process. This is an industry that I am more familiar with because of the BASIS Oro Valley Community Outreach day. During Community Outreach Day, I was able to take a tour of the drug discovery company; Icagen. During this tour, I learned about a process called high through-put screening. High through-put screening is done to find a chemical that will have the desired effect on a specific tissue. By definition, at least 100,000 different chemical compounds must be tested to qualify as high through-put screening. My book goes into greater detail about the realities of this process and discusses the romanticized view of pharmaceutical research. Schacter explains that many people picture research as taking place in a laboratory with a lone scientist, rapidly combining chemicals in order to create a lifesaving medicine. Since the integration of high through-put screening, this is far from reality. Even before high through-put screening, teams of researchers would work for months and occasionally make an accidental discovery that resulted in a new drug. High through-put screening often involves teams of people who “are more engineers and computer experts than biologists” (Schacter 21). Often, this mass testing of compounds simply involves typing commands into a computer and waiting for the results. Although less exciting, high through-put screening allows for the testing of millions of compounds in a fraction of the time that a human would require.

I also read about the importance of animal testing in the pharmaceutical industry. Schacter explained how animal testing offers a more comprehensive view of the reaction between the chemical compounds being used and an organism. Mammals have several billion cells along with hundreds of thousands of proteins. Each of these cells and proteins are another opportunity for a chemical to cause harm. Additionally, lab tests cannot account for every possible reaction in every cell because of the countless number of potential reagents. Animal testing allows the researchers to observe all possible side effects of a drug, without putting humans in harm’s way. Although animal testing is standard in the pharmaceutical industry, it cannot always accurately predict a drug’s success in humans. However genetically similar a chimpanzee may be to humans, there are still many distinct differences in the chemical makeup of our bodies. This is why later tests are carried out on carefully selected people.

Although animal testing has been a controversial topic, it has been deemed necessary in the pharmaceutical sector in order to ensure the safety of consumers. In the future, it is possible that more thorough tests can be developed that will ensure the safety of humans and erase the need for animals.