The Quest for the Cure For Cancer

The Quest for the Cure For CancerWhile the history of drug discovery is steeped in science and mathematics, it is now becoming apparent that science fiction may very well be the harbinger of the future of pharmaceutical chemistry. It is as simple as that. The path to finding the answer to the big question of how do you create a cure for cancer has led into the world of science and technology.While chemists have been able to develop a cure for cancer, the question has not been at the forefront of their minds. How do you come up with a cure? The need for finding a cure for cancer has been met in recent years when scientists have developed gene therapy, which uses a special gene treatment to correct the genetic mutation that causes a patient's cancer to develop. This means that while chemotherapy is the standard treatment for treating cancer, the discovery that using gene therapy can effectively combat the disease will allow doctors to attack the source of the problem.But that is not th e end of the drug discovery process. After a doctor has identified which types of cancer the patient carries a specific gene mutation for, the next step is to use a drug to 'knock out' this gene mutation. By eliminating the gene mutation, the cancer can be treated, eradicating the problem.In order to determine the efficiency of these drugs, scientists have looked towards the basic science of how the body produces drugs. If the drug is too weak, then the same effect is achieved with a higher dosage of the drug. This allows the development of the dosage that will be most effective for the particular patient being treated.But what if the drug was designed to make a patient grow weaker? Would it be effective to the person? Would it not make him a candidate for a type of drug resistance that would undermine the usefulness of the drug?The answer is simple and straight forward, but the method of understanding it remains elusive. With the discovery of the key role that drugs play in the bod y, the discovery of a method to manipulate the body's own processes has been given added value. For pharmaceutical chemistry, it is obvious that they will attempt to learn how the body works, so that the cure is created that the body will take.It is the understanding of the fundamental workings of drugs that pharmaceutical chemistry is working on now will play a very big role in understanding the cure for cancer. But the role of scientific discovery in the discovery of a cure has not been understood. It has not been stressed enough, and so the only way that the cure will be made is by testing. Testing on animals, testing on humans and testing to see if any side effects have come up.While we are still a long way off from actually discovering the cure for cancer, we have created the tools to understand how drugs work. This can, in part, be seen in the remarkable progress that has been made in drug discovery since the discovery of the gene that causes cancer. As scientists continue to research and create new compounds to treat different types of cancer, the discoveries in the field of pharmaceutical chemistry will continue to move forward. Until the cure for cancer has been found, the search for the answer will continue to be a mystery.