A Pharmaceutical Scientist Explains How Drugs Know Where to Go in The Body
Tom Anchordoquy in The Conversation, June 2022
When you take aspirin for a headache, how does the aspirin know to travel to your head and alleviate the pain? The short answer is, it doesn’t: Molecules can’t transport themselves through the body, and they don’t have control over where they eventually end up. But researchers can chemically modify drug molecules to make sure that they bind strongly to the places we want them and weakly to the places we don’t.
Pharmaceutical products contain more than just the active drug that directly affects the body. Medications also include “inactive ingredients,” or molecules that enhance the stability, absorption, flavor and other qualities that are critical to allowing the drug to do its job. For example, the aspirin you swallow also has ingredients that both prevent the tablet from fracturing during shipping and help it break apart in your body.
As a pharmaceutical scientist, I’ve been studying drug delivery for the past 30 years. That is, developing methods and designing nondrug components that help get a medication where it needs to go in the body.
To better understand the thought process behind how different drugs are designed, let’s follow a drug from when it first enters the body to where it eventually ends up…
