4 ms·
As I understand it, most drugs are still a pretty "blunt" from the standpoint of biochemistry. Too much of X causes some problem, so you make an antagonist for
by tsotha 11y ago
As I understand it, most drugs are still a pretty "blunt" from the standpoint of biochemistry. Too much of X causes some problem, so you make an antagonist for X. But X does a half dozen other things, and your X antagonist is going to affect them all. 99% of the time we call them "side effects", and they're bad. It's not that they have "no fucking idea" what they're doing; it's that sometimes there's no way to isolate the system they want to affect. The human body wasn't designed for external maintenance.
- refurb 11y agoYup. Those are called "off target effects". Think of a drug that has a well known mechanism of action like beta blockers (they block the beta form of the adrenergic receptor). Go one step further and find a beta-1 antagonist like atenolol. Now look at the binding constant across other receptors. The selectivity can be relatively small! A beta blocker will often bind with relatively high affinity to another 5 or 10 receptors!