Making Xopenex
- Tuesday, July 28, 2009, 14:08
- Asthma
- 664 views
- Add a comment
- Andrew:
- How did scientists achieve a better formulation of albuterol?
- Dr. Lanier:
- Most everybody that looks at medications and looks at a formula for medications thinks that the chemical in solution is just that formula. Actually, it’s a little bit more complicated than that and always is. The compounds actually have mirror images of each other. The mirror images are called isomers, and even though the isomers have the same formula as each other, they sometimes have entirely different functions. We look back in history and find that some chemicals that were introduced had really negative things associated with one of the isomers or the other. What’s happened in the last couple of years is that companies are beginning to think about producing medications which are very pure, which contain only the active isomer needed and not any additional baggage. And the thing about albuterol, I think in the last couple of years we’ve realized, is it has a lot of baggage. This S-isomer in albuterol is just unnecessary and may actually contribute to inflammation. So, when you take it out, you come up with a purer compound, and when you do that, you can get by with a much lower dosage. And of course the results of a lot lower dosage is that people have lots less in the way of side effects than they might have had if they had used the older drugs.
- Andrew:
- This sounds like it’s making a tried and true drug therapy more effective.
- Dr. Lanier:
- Well, one of the things we’ve learned once we purified albuterol was that the material that we took out of albuterol, the impurities, actually were sort of an inflammatory compound. In some cases, we think if enough of that builds up, people have to use another medicine to compensate for it, like a steroid or cromolyn or a leukotriene modifier like Singulair. So, once we cleared up the albuterol, we find that the use of other drugs go down quite a bit. It’s actually pretty refreshing to see that reducing the impurities in a drug can result in less overall drug use.
About the Author
admin has written 208 stories on this site.
Write a Comment
Gravatars are small images that can show your personality. You can get your gravatar for free today!