What I learned week 4

This week I learned a lot about the chemistry of drugs as well as the research and development of drugs. On average, it takes about 10-15 years for a drug to come to market. I briefly had learned about this in my diseases and drug therapy class when we had a whole unit on the FDA and drug development. Something new to me I learned was bout the Placebo effect within pharmaceuticals. I already knew what the placebo effect was, but I wasn’t familiar with the fact that all drugs when being tested must be compared with a placebo drug. Placebos act as the dummy treatments, injections, pills procedures, surgeries etc. Many people experience drug effects when they believe they have taken a drug but have not. Data suggests that placebos work 30% of the time. When someone takes a placebo drug they think happy thoughts that they’re going to get cured; and when they think these happy thoughts they release hormones that aid in healing immune response, otherwise known as endorphins. These placebo effects we learn about in science can translate into the real world, such as the Rosenthal Effect and Hawthorne effect. The Rosenthal Effect also known as the teacher expectancy effect refers to data that students who are expected to perform better than ‘regular’ students do so because they are expected to do so. So the Rosenthal Effect takes place in the classroom, whereas the Hawthorne Effect takes place in the workplace. All in all, this means it is very hard to conduct an unbiased study. I never realized how many steps there were into designing and developing a drug. One step that I thought was interesting was step 5. Structure Activity Relationships, or SAR. SAR is the relationship between the chemical or 3D structure of a molecule and its biological activity. The analysis of SAR enables the determination of the chemical group responsible for evoking a target biological effect in the organism. I like learning about the chemistry about drugs because I like tying the science with the business aspects that I’ve learned here at Western New England.