Medicines necessary

Molecular modeling has evolved as a synthesis of techniques from a number of disciplines—organic chemistry, medicinal chemistry, physical chemistry, chemical physics, computer science, mathematics, and statistics. With the development of quantum mechanics (1,2) ia the early 1900s, the laws of physics necessary to relate molecular electronic stmcture to observable properties were defined. In a confluence of related developments, engineering and the national defense both played roles ia the development of computing machinery itself ia the United States (3). This evolution had a direct impact on computing ia chemistry, as the newly developed devices could be appHed to problems ia chemistry, permitting solutions to problems previously considered intractable. 

In one of the early experiments designed to elucidate the genetic code, Marshall Nirenberg of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, 1968) prepared a synthetic mRNA in which all the bases were uracil. He added this poly(U) to a cell-free system containing all the necessary materials for protein biosynthesis. A polymer of a single amino acid was obtained. What amino acid was polymerized ... 

A meaningful dialogue between chemists and pharmacologists is the single most important element of the drug discovery process. The necessary link between medicinal chemistry and pharmacology has been elucidated by Paton [2] ... 

G.19 In medicine it is sometimes necessary to prepare solutions with a specific concentration of a given ion. A lab technician has made up a 100.0-mL solution containing 0.50 g of NaCl and 0.30 g of KCl, as well as glucose and other sugars. What is the concentration of chloride ions in the solution ... 

Applications to establish MRLs for new pharmacologically active substances must be submitted to the European Medicines Agency (EMEA) at least 6 months in advance of an application for a marketing authorisation. In order to avoid delays, manufacturers are advised to submit an application once all the necessary data are available, as a product authorisation carmot be granted unless established MRLs are in place. The EMEA should be notified of the intent to submit an application 3 to 4 months in advance of the anticipated date, so that a Rapporteur and Co-Rapporteur can be appointed from among the members of the Committee for Veterinary Medicinal Products (CVMP). 

Traditionally, in pursuit of their structure-activity relationships, medicinal chemists had focused almost exclusively on finding compounds with greater and greater potency. However, these SARs often ended up with compounds that were unsuitable for development as pharmaceutical products. These compounds would be too insoluble in water, or were not orally bioavailable, or were eliminated too quickly or too slowly from mammalian bodies. Pharmacologists and pharmaceutical development scientists for years had tried to preach the need for medicinal chemists to also think about other factors that determined whether a compound could be a medicine. Table 1.1 lists a number of factors that determine whether a potent compound has what it takes to become a drug. Experimentally, it was difficult to quantitate these other factors. Often, the necessary manpower resources would not be allocated to a compound until it had already been selected for project team status. 

Figure 4.4 The general protocol for information extraction from an herbal text (A-E) is paired with case examples from our work with the Ambonese Herbal by Rumphius. (A) Text is digitized. (B) Through either manual reading or automated extraction the plant name(s), plant part(s), and symptoms or disorders are identified. (C) These extracted data are then updated (as necessary) to reflect current names of the plants, using the International Plant Names Index (IPNI), and the pharmacological function(s) of the described medicinal plants are extrapolated from the mentioned symptoms and disorders. (D) The current botanical names are queried against a natural products database such as the NAPRALERT database to determine whether the plant has been previously examined. (E) Differential tables are generated that separate the plants examined in the literature from plants that may warrant further examination for bioactivity. (Adapted from Trends in Pharmacological Sciences, with permission.) See color plate.

Web in the life of the medicinal chemist. One may see the development of alerting services for the primary medicinal chemistry journals. The Web-based information search process could be replaced by a much more structured one based on metadata, derived by automated processing of the original full-text article. To discover new and potentially interesting articles, the user subscribes to the RSS feeds of relevant publishers and can simply search the latest items that appear automatically for keywords of interest. The article download is still necessary, but it may be possible for the client software to automatically invoke bibliographic tools to store the found references. Another application of the Chemical Semantic Web may be as alerting services for new additions to chemical databases where users get alerts for the new additions of structures or reactions. 

True. Most medicines, if used incorrectly, have the potential to cause harm. This is particularly so when incorrectly used by young people. They should be kept safely out of reach of young people at all times, and only given when necessary by a responsible adult. 

Microbial contaminants will usually need to be able to attack ingredients of a medicine and create substrates necessary for biosynthesis and energy production before they can replicate to levels where obvious spoilage becomes apparent since, for example, 10 microbes will have an overall degradative effect around 10 time faster than one cell. However, growth and attack may well be localized in surface moisture films or very unevenly distributed within the bulk of viscous formulations such as creams. Early... 

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