Question: what type of drugs do you deal with in your job ??

Alex Lyness answered on 23 Jun 2014:

Hey lea986,

I deal with all types of drugs in my job. Some are more ‘potent’ (dangerous) than others and require different amounts of safety equipment to be worn when working with them.

I’m never concerned with what the drug does as that is for the clinicians (scientists, doctors, surgeons, etc.) to decide.

As an engineer what I normally need to know is;

1) What the drug looks like – is it a liquid, solid or a powder?
2) How much of it there is – grams, milligrams, micrograms?
3) Where in the body it needs to go – does it need to go into the blood, through the skin, in the mouth, up the nose, into the lungs, etc. to do its job?

The drugs I’ve worked with before include;

Epinephrine (used for people who are allergic to things and go into a shock)
Glucagon (used for diabetics who go into shock if their blood sugar gets really low)
HGH or Human growth hormone (used on people who don’t grown very well in their teenage years)
Fentanyl (a very powerful pain relief drug used by the army)
Octreotide (used during some cancer treatments)

All the drugs above are liquids, solids or powders and can be delivered in many different ways…some of them without using needles!

I am now working on delivery medicines made out of human cells into the body. The biggest issue compared to the drugs mentioned in the list above is that cell-based medicines are in fact ‘alive’ and must stay alive as they are injected into the body. This can be REALLY tricky as the cells are so delicate!