• Question: When trying to develop the new medicines , what’s the hardest part ?

    Asked by anon-199468 to Kate on 7 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: Kate McGonagle

      Kate McGonagle answered on 7 Mar 2019:


      This is a great question! Dealing with the failure rate is sometimes quite difficult. To be a new medicine it has to tick so many boxes and it has to be such a delicate balance of properties – it has to be active and do the job you want, it has to be soluble so that when you take it, it can get to all the right places in your body, it can’t be highly cleared by your bodies own metabolism as it needs to stay around long enough to do the job and not just be immediately broken down. This is just a few of the properties we have to get exactly right. It can be very frustrating when you have a molecule that ticks every box but one….Sometimes a lot of effort goes into a project and we eventually have to walk away from it as we can’t achieve what we need. That’s hard!

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