BPS 2110 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Naturopathy, Paclitaxel, Small Molecule
12 Sep 2016
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Biopharmaceutics: study of the properties of therapeutic substances and their dosages/bioactivity relationships. Bioactivity: desired effect we want the drug to have. Complicated issue as many drugs have different physical properties. Most are organic in nature and organics are not generally water soluble. Taxol: used to treat breast cancer but many cancers return and develop a tolerance to drugs used before for treatment. Therapeutic substances: prescription drugs, small molecule - (generally with a molecular weight < 500). Anything larger than that has a hard time crossing the blood brain barrier: peptides/proteins - tend to steer away from these as we have proteases that specialize in cleaving off peptide portions. This shortens the half-life of the drug and means you need to take it more often: vaccines and conjugates essential for protection and directly impact our life, natural health products (nhp"s, vitamins, plant extracts. * need to be careful with these as they are not closely regulated as pharmaceuticals are.
