• Question: are all drugs made from the same things?

    Asked by erhpls123 to Alex, Claire, Kate, Marcus, Neil on 23 Jun 2014.
    • Photo: Alex Lyness

      Alex Lyness answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      Hey erhpls,

      The simple answer is: nope!

      Drugs do their jobs using loads of different ingredients, that work in loads of different ways and on loads of different things. The only thing they often have in common is they must have a ‘pharmacological’ effect, which basically means they are a medicine of some kind.

      Paracetamol and Aspirin are drugs with two totally different chemical compounds. Both can reduce the amount of pain we may feel (headache, fever, high temperature) and both do it in different ways from different ingredients. For drugs that reduce pain we call they ‘analgesics’ there are many different types, some can be seen here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analgesic

      Some other drugs that stop pain are made from tree bark (Salicylic acid) and even poppy flower seeds (Morphine). Nowadays, now that a lot of the compounds in nature are known drugs can be ‘synthesised’ (man-made) by chemical compounds instead.

      Without going on too much about the details, drugs are made from all different molecules, chemicals, hormones, etc. They are grouped in classes depending on the job they do and not what they are made from.

      Hope that helps 🙂

    • Photo: Marcus Johns

      Marcus Johns answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      As a slight counter-argument to Alex’s answer, you could say that yes, all drugs are made from the same things. Generally, all drugs are based on the same few elements – carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorous. The way the drug works and how effective it is depends entirely on how many atoms of each the drug contains and the chemical structure of it.

      However, no scientist or engineer is going to take the pure elements and try to make a drug from them. It would take too much energy and would be very expensive. That’s why some scientists try to find new drugs from plants or create them in bacteria, and others take simple chemical molecules and then add other chemical groups to them to make more complicated structures (synthetic drugs).

      So, although all drugs are made from the same elements, I would agree with Alex and say that they are not all made from the same things from an engineering point of view as you start with different raw materials!

    • Photo: Claire Brockett

      Claire Brockett answered on 24 Jun 2014:

      hey erhpls123
      interesting question, and I think Alex and Marcus have covered this pretty well 🙂
      Development of drugs is often completed by pharmacologists and chemists – but engineers can get in there too to support development and drug delivery.

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