Therapeutic drugs future developments

In many developing countries of the world, there is still a major reliance on crude drug preparation of plants used in traditional medicines for their primary health care. Pharmacognosists employed in the different institutions are aware of the changing trends of herbal medications and a number of useful texts on the analysis, uses, and potential toxicities of herbal remedies have appeared recently, which serves as useful guides in pharmacy practice. The history of medicine includes many ludicrous therapies. Nevertheless, ancient wisdom has been the basis of modem medicine and will remain as one important source of future medicine and therapeutics. The future of natural products drug discovery will be more holistic, personahzed and involve the wise use of ancient and modem therapeutic skills in a complementary manner so that maximum benefits can be accmed to the patients and the community. 

With regard to the systemic administration of smaller proteins (<20 kDa), the development of insulin for inhalation has shown that the pulmonary route is a feasible route of administration. However, advanced inhalation devices and formulations were required to obtain a reproducible lung deposition. It will be especially necessary to deal with the problems that occur when drugs with a small therapeutic window are administered. To enable widespread use of the lung as port of entry for these small proteins, future developments should be directed towards more simple inhalation devices which still give a high and reproducible lung deposition. The formulations that will be required for these proteins are likely to be much more complex and advanced than those that are currently used. Examples are formu-... 

Hudson, J. Towers, G. H. N. Phytomedidnes as antivirals. Drugs Future, 1999,24 295-320. Yang, S. S. Cragg, G. M. Newman, D. J. Bader, J. P. Natural product-based anti-HIV drug discovery and development facilitated by the NCI developmental therapeutics program. J. Nat. Prod., 2001, 64 265 277. 

Once these further tasks have been achieved, and the regulation of the endocannabinoid system under both physiological and pathological conditions is fully understood, it will be possible to assess whether endocannabinoid-based medicines with clear advantages over other established therapeutic drugs could be developed in the future. 

These findings have been of importance not only for the successful development of Herceptin itself but are hkely to serve as a prime example and to provide guidance for the development of future innovative (anticancer) drugs overall. Ideally, future development of targeted therapies should involve concomitant diagnostic and therapeutic strategies to circumvent development failures and to allow us to maximize clinical benefit. 

These multicapsules, also called capsosomes, can be used in the design and fabrication of artificial cells or organelles with therapeutic purposes [231]. The combination of liposomes and polymers layers allows one to obtain hybrid cargo systems with the advantages of both type of materials, but that overcome some of the limitation associated to the individual materials (e.g. mechanical stability of the liposomes). Furthermore, an important advantage of these multicapsules is the possibility to introduce several functionalities in the systems, that opens important challenge in the future development of drug delivery platforms. 

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