Question: What medicine(s) (recently) have been made from crystals and what have they been made to cure? Have the medicine(s) been successful?

Lynne Thomas answered on 17 Jun 2014:

Good question! The answer is actually more than you could imagine! Pretty much anything that is a solid is also a crystal. So things in your everyday life like sugar and salt, expensive things like diamonds, the battery in your mobile phone. And medicines are no different, common things being paracetamol and ibuprofen. If you think about it as a patient, if you are going to take a medicine, you want it to be as easy as possible. The easiest way (and in fact the cheapest) is to take a tablet.

When the pharmaceutical industry (the medicine makers) develop a new drug, they don’t just have to think about what molecule they have made, but they also have to think about how you are going to take it. This involves both it being nice for the patient, but also they have to make sure that however you take it, the medicine can get to the right part of your body. So that could be your head if you have a headache, or your stomach if you have upset tummy. The way that the molecules join into the solid (or the crystal) really affects how well they do this. It has to be able to dissolve in your blood as that is the best way your body has to transport things around your body. This is called formulation and this is the point at which the medicine makers really decide whether a new treatment is going to work or not and often they can’t find a reasonable way to get it to work.

You can play tricks with the crystals though to try and help this process. If you imagine you were going to tile a driveway with bricks. You can do this two ways, one where the bricks are all parallel like in a brick wall and one where they are tilted which makes it look much prettier! But the size and shape of one brick is the same and both ways fill up the driveway. Molecules can do the same thing in that you can put them into the crystal in different ways. This is called polymorphism and it can have a big effect on how soluble the drug molecule is. So there is a lot of research going on both in universities like I work in, but also in big pharmaceutical companies to find the best ways to make crystals (and therefore tablets) that are good at getting to the right place in your body!

So the short answer to your question is more than I could mention and there are lots of very successful ones already around and new ones being developed all the time!