I love the story of valproate. About fifty years ago, an investigator was using a fatty carboxylic acid as a delivery vehicle for antiseizure medications. He looked at it alone in controls and, lo and behold, it was a drug on its own:
It's a humbling reminder to anyone who's ever designed a drug: we are not as S-M-R-T as we think we are.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
The results from Heath Ledger's autopsy came out today. Though the doses of the drugs have not been released, it appears that he died from combining drugs with similar effects rather than an overdose of a single drug:
Among the drugs found in Mr. Ledger's system were two widely prescribed…
A pastor in Illinois was shot and killed over the weekend. A similar tragedy happened in my community many years ago. Religious leaders are very public figures and have an emotional connection with members of their communities, so I suppose it's not so strange that they should be targets. Many…
Before I get to the substance of this post, let me state that I'm not a big fan of genetically modified food crops (GMO crops). And there are few bloggers who have spent more time blogging about antibiotic resistance (never mind spending part of his professional career addressing the problem).…
So there I was, happily settled in Heffers with a nice large cup of coffee, looking forward to reliving the Newton-Leibnitz controversy via "the system of the world" when I thought I'd have a quick browse of "The Cult of the Amateur" by Andrew Keen, since it was on a nearby rack. It's the std.rant…
Yeah! You're back! I was worried that you may have abandoned us. I just recently found your blog, and I love it:)
"It's a humbling reminder to anyone who's ever designed a drug: we are not as S-M-R-T as we think we are." You can get this in spades at In the Pipeline, a blog on the pharmaceutical industry from the perspective of a bench chemist.
A fun offshoot was loading tiny Alzet osmotic pumps for animal sustained direct brain dosing studies. The acid has crappy water solubility, the sodium salt is highly alkaline. They couldn't get enough pH-buffered aqueous solution into the pump to do a decent study.
Wonderful minimalist answer! Dissolve the Na salt in the neat acid to buffer pH of pump micro-effluent when it hit biology.
I forgot to comment when you first posted this but that valproic acid story is a great one to teach students about why we run vehicle control groups in all of our studies, no matter the system.