Dr Bryan Deane talks us through how the process of researching and developing a new medicine gets started.
Dr Sheuli Porkess talks us through how potential new medicines and vaccines go through rigorous clinical trials.
Dr Ali Hansford looks at what the future hold for medicines research and the treatments on the horizon.
The first step is to identify the target; maybe a cell receptor or an enzyme or a gene that’s involved in the disease process. The next challenge is to find something which affects that target to interfere with or prevent the development of disease or symptoms.
We sometimes have to test tens of thousands of molecules either through computer modelling, or in test tubes or cell cultures or in animals to identify a few that are effective enough to take forward to trial in patients.
The biopharmaceutical industry invests more than anyone else in research and development.
New science is becoming more and more precise. Despite the fact that failure rates are still high we’re learning about disease all the time and when we do have successes, we’re bringing improvements to the lives of millions of patients around the world.
