Inside Story of Making Medicines

摘要

The International Webinar entitled 'From Bench to Bedside: The Inside Story of How Medicines are Made' was organized by Department of Microbiology and Biochemistry, St. Berchmans College (Autonomous), Dist. Kottayam, Kerala on 7/11/2020. In this programme, Dr Robin Mathew, Global Clinical Strategy Lead, Johnson and Johnson Inc., USA spoke on the subject. While elaborating on drug discovery 'From the cell to the pill: how do we design molecules against cell targets' and differentiating between naturals and synthetic, Dr Mathew mentioned that people want to go for natural alternatives instead of conceiving chemicals, but in fact all of the lots of chemical molecules (medicines) isolated come from plants and implicated in different diseases. Over 28,000 medicines are derived from plants, that include the important drug Paclitaxel that treats cancer. Plants like foxglove (for medicine Digoxin), willow (wonder drug Aspirin), poppy (for Morphine), mayapple (cancer drug Etopside) play important roles in drug discovery. Everything in this universe is a chemical in some fashion and details about the plant and the molecules it consist must be known.