Are you curious about where medicines came from? Fret no more. We are here to help inform you about this topic. So, keep on reading to learn more.
Look:
One of the most essential necessities for anyone is medicine. By intaking medication, curing that awful fever, runny nose, and severe headache will be a piece of cake. However, misusing and abusing drugs can also lead to dangerous situations. And worse, if we by chance get counterfeit medicine, there’s a high probability that these drugs can harm us to the point of it being life-threatening.
That is why we must strive to be more informed about drugs and how they are delivered. Now, we are here to help you out with this. As such, we came up with a step-by-step process of how medicine comes to our local pharmacies. Interested to know about it? Then without further ado, let’s get started.
Related: Cell Line Development Process
What is Medicine?
Before anything else, an important question we should answer is this. Medications are composed of chemicals and compounds that are formulated by researchers or doctors. They do this to ease the symptoms felt by patients suffering from illnesses. Drugs are also prescribed by doctors to cure ailments of people and to save their lives.
However, in today’s age, other ways of developing medicines have also become the norm. With modern technology, physicians have found out that drugs can also come from living cells. This is through biopharmaceutical processes. And through thorough experiments using this method, more helpful medicines were produced by biopharma companies to further aid troubled patients. If you wish to learn more regarding this, check out KBI Biopharma. They’re a company specializing in this niche. Visit their site to learn more about KBI and its services.
Where Does Medicine Come From?
Now that we are more informed about what medicines are, the next thing is to learn how they get to our local drugstores and to us.
1. Drug Discovery
Suppose you think that drug discovery only involves doctors. In that case, you will be surprised at how many professionals collaborated to create a single drug. You see, in developing medicine, various chemists, biologists, and physicians combine their knowledge and skills. The chemist is the one building molecules that could potentially become a medicine.
Meanwhile, the biologist handles everything related to investigating whether a molecule affects the cause of a particular disease. And together, these two find a way to decipher how molecular interactions define the way drugs cure diseases. As they see the relevance of this, they create medicines out of it. This is pretty much the process of drug discovery.
2. Clinical Trials and Experiments
Once the drug is created, the next thing to do is to test this on a cell. If the medicine is found to be effective, the testing moves on to animals. And in case the previous experiments are successful, the next move is to have clinical trials. This means that actual people are observed once they intake the medicine created. The effectiveness of the drug and how threatening it is to patients are also studied at this stage.
3. FDA Approval
Lastly, before being imported into local drugstores, the FDA has to approve the medications first. This is the step where most companies fail. As such, they lose tons of time and money. But you must see the importance of this step too. Without the FDA’s regulation, a harmful drug might get mass-produced, causing many people to get hurt.
See Also: Biologics Process Development