Most medicines are influenced by the ways in which my work approaches things. Making a medicine is not just a matter of building the right molecule to do a job, but its also about making it into a form that is convenient to take but that also is easily broken down so that it can get to the right place in your body. This is called formulation and is one of the key parts of the manufacture of medicines. The easiest way to take a medicine is in a tablet form, but sometimes if you take it in its pure form, then it doesn’t dissolve very well in your body. That means that you need to play tricks with it. So sometimes you can mix it with something else which does not have any effect on your body and this helps it to dissolve.
Sometimes medicines don’t form very good tablets either. If you look at paracetamol for instance, if you buy cheap paracetamol it tastes very chalky. This is because paracetamol a tablet of paracetamol falls apart if you just use it on its own so chalk is put into it to make it hold together! Chalk is cheap so that’s why its in your cheap paracetamol and it is harmless. Then if you buy more expensive paracetamol, a nicer second part is added to it which tastes a bit better! You can actually put paracetamol into a solid in a different way much like tiling a drive with bricks – sometimes the bricks are put together in parallel with each other and sometimes they are tilted from one another which makes a prettier driveway. The same shaped bricks can be put together in different ways. In solids and using molecules instead of bricks, this is something called polymorphism. If you put the paracetamol molecules together in a different way, it forms better tablets and dissolves better. So why don’t we use that one then you ask? Because it is not as happy to be put into a solid in this way and it would rather turn into the powdery form so the tablets fall apart with time!
It actually takes a long time to get a medicine from its discovery through to being a product you can buy as there are a lot of tests that need to be done to make sure that it is safe. But there are lots of people both in Universities and in companies who are trying to play tricks to make better ways to give you medicines. Either by changing the way the molecules go into the solid by themselves, or by sticking a second molecule in there to help. So things I’m working on are a long way from being a real medicine but it is helping us to understand how to get the tricks to work!
Strangely enough my work on pigments in the feathers of extinct Jurassic and Cretaceous birds has led my team to study the structure of one particular type of melanin called eumelanin. We were the first to define the structure of this particular pigment through using synchrotron light to peak inside at the arrangements of the atoms that construct this molecule. This information can now be used by scientists in the development drugs associated with conditions that impact upon this pigment molecule (e.g. Melanoma).
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Phillip commented on :
Strangely enough my work on pigments in the feathers of extinct Jurassic and Cretaceous birds has led my team to study the structure of one particular type of melanin called eumelanin. We were the first to define the structure of this particular pigment through using synchrotron light to peak inside at the arrangements of the atoms that construct this molecule. This information can now be used by scientists in the development drugs associated with conditions that impact upon this pigment molecule (e.g. Melanoma).