98 questions · 64 sources · 0 syntheses
Drug Discovery and Pharmacology
The science of finding and developing therapeutic drugs.
Source-derived questions
Questions extracted from the papers in this topic, excluding the curated questions above.
- Did socks over shoes actually outperform ice cleats in the trial?
- How are defects in ubiquitin pathways connected to diseases like Parkinson's and cancer?
- How did AZT's launch price shape the patient advocacy movement around pharmaceutical pricing?
- How did Albert Hofmann discover LSD's psychoactive effects five years after first synthesising it?
- How did Banerjee, Duflo, and Kremer adapt the randomised controlled trial from medicine to test anti-poverty programs?
- How did Bovet's earlier work on antihistamines connect to his approach to muscle relaxants?
- How did Chain and Florey prove in 1941 that penicillin could save a dying patient?
- How did Dale's identification of histamine eventually lead to the antihistamines developed in the 1940s?
- How did Ehrlich's targeted-molecule approach shape the drug development that followed, from sulphonamides to penicillin?
- How did Henry Dale first extract histamine from ergot fungus rather than from animal tissue?
- How did Hofmann accidentally absorb LSD through his skin on 16 April 1943, and what did he record about the experience?
- How did James Black's rational, receptor-first approach differ from the mass-screening drug discovery of his era?
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- How did John Vane discover that aspirin works by inhibiting the enzyme cyclo-oxygenase?
- How did Lotte Bjerre Knudsen engineer semaglutide to survive in the bloodstream long enough for weekly dosing?
- How did Lotte Bjerre Knudsen's fatty acid modification extend GLP-1's half-life into a once-weekly drug?
- How did Schenk's trial compare a placebo with a side-effect label against one without any side-effect information?
- How did William Knowles use a chiral catalyst to make a purer version of the Parkinson's drug L-DOPA?
- How did establishing enzymes as proteins lay groundwork for modern pharmaceutical drug design?
- How did fluoxetine (Prozac) trigger spawning behaviour in freshwater clams?
- How did mapping the cholesterol synthesis pathway lead to the development of statins?
- How did solving the protease's crystal structure help researchers design saquinavir?
- How did the randomised controlled trial compare ice cream to standard mucositis care?
- How did the urgency of wartime casualties drive the industrialization of penicillin production in the United States?
- How did this cell-fractionation work change scientists' understanding of how drugs act on cells?
- How did this trio's work push the pharmaceutical industry toward structure-based drug design?
- How does L-DOPA therapy restore movement to Parkinson's patients?
- How does organocatalysis make pharmaceutical manufacturing cleaner and cheaper?
- How does the discovery of cyclic AMP connect to how caffeine affects the body?
- How does the pharmaceutical industry's modern ability to manufacture complex molecules trace back to Woodward's methods?
- How fast was the FDA's review of AZT in 1987, and why was that speed unusual?
- How large was the 1954 field trial that tested the Salk vaccine, and why did its scale matter for the results announced in 1955?
- How many fungal cultures did Endo screen before finding mevastatin, the first statin, in a Penicillium mould?
- How many total syntheses of natural products did Corey complete using his method, and why does that matter for the pharmaceutical industry?
- How much has ivermectin reduced the worm burden in affected regions?
- How was ivermectin isolated from soil bacteria collected across Japan?
- How widely are palladium-catalysed couplings used in pharmaceutical manufacturing today?
- In what ways do pharmaceutical and materials labs today rely on the computational chemistry methods Kohn and Pople developed?
- What clinical trial produced a paper with roughly a hundred times as many authors as pages?
- What did Paul Ehrlich mean by a 'magic bullet' (Zauberkugel) and how did Salvarsan fulfill that idea?
- What did Paul Ehrlich mean by a 'magic bullet' and where did the concept come from?
- What did clinical trials in the late 1970s show about statins' effect on LDL cholesterol and heart attacks?
- What did the clinical trial measure, and how much did four months of didgeridoo practice improve it?
- What do G-protein-coupled receptors do, and why do roughly a third of all drugs target them?
- What does it mean for pharmacology to become 'rational' rather than based on grinding up plants?
- What does this finding suggest about how pharmaceutical labeling itself can act as part of a drug's effect?
- What fields of biology and medicine were reshaped once patch-clamp made individual channel behavior observable?
- What happened to patients with encephalitis lethargica when treated with L-DOPA?
- What historical text pointed Tu Youyou toward sweet wormwood as a fever remedy?
- What hypothesis led Akira Endo to search fungal cultures for a cholesterol-lowering compound?
- What impact did direct methods have on the speed of drug structure determination?
- What impact did multiscale simulation methods have on modern drug discovery?
- What is Fischer's lock-and-key model of enzyme action, and why does it still matter to pharmaceutical design?
- What is ergot, and why was it already notorious before Hofmann used it in his research?
- What is streptokinase, and what future medical use did its discovery point toward?
- What kinds of interventions, like school meals and deworming tablets, did the researchers test in Kenya and India?
- What logistical problem stood between penicillin's proven clinical effect and treating soldiers at scale?
- What longer-term research and cultural effects followed from Hofmann's 1943 resynthesis of LSD?
- What made Hofmann's laboratory notes from Bicycle Day notable as a scientific document?
- What made cognitive therapy easier to test in clinical trials than earlier psychotherapies?
- What manufacturing technique let American pharmaceutical companies scale penicillin from teaspoons to tons?
- What metabolic differences between cancer cells and normal cells did Elion and Hitchings exploit to design their drugs?
- What modern applications rely on Raman spectroscopy today?
- What modern applications trace back to Pedersen's discovery of crown ethers?
- What practical applications rely on MOFs' huge internal surface area, from carbon capture to drug delivery?
- What problem did Daniel Bovet solve by synthesizing artificial analogues of curare's active principle?
- What problem in drug manufacturing did asymmetric catalysis solve for the pharmaceutical industry?
- What real-world implications does the price-placebo effect have for how medicines are marketed and prescribed?
- What were the ethical problems with the clinical trials Gregory Pincus ran in Puerto Rico and Haiti?
- Which drugs are now manufactured using metathesis reactions?
- Which modern drug classes work by altering the chemical signalling between nerves that Loewi and Dale discovered?
- Which modern peptide drugs trace their manufacturing logic back to Merrifield's solid-phase method?
- Which modern pharmaceuticals and natural products rely on the Diels-Alder reaction?
- Why couldn't Fleming's original discovery become a usable drug without Chain and Florey's later work?
- Why did Hofmann first set LSD aside in 1938 after synthesizing it while researching ergot alkaloid derivatives?
- Why did Oxford nurses recycle patients' urine during early penicillin trials?
- Why did Peter Fong's description of the clams as 'happy' become contested among researchers?
- Why did Salk first test his vaccine on children who had already survived polio?
- Why did doctors recover penicillin from a patient's own urine to reuse it?
- Why did earlier development economics prescriptions like structural adjustment and microfinance have an uneven track record?
- Why did earlier high-temperature extraction methods fail to find artemisinin?
- Why did establishing reaction dynamics as geometry and energy transfer make it possible to design drug molecules rather than stumble on them?
- Why do roughly a third of modern drugs target G-protein-coupled receptors?
- Why do these two reactions matter so much for pharmaceutical manufacturing?
- Why does a large international heart-attack trial require so many contributing investigators?
- Why does a protein's three-dimensional fold determine its biological function?
- Why does blocking a neurotransmitter transporter make that neurotransmitter linger longer in the synapse?
- Why does conformational analysis matter for designing drugs?
- Why had willow bark been used as a folk remedy for thousands of years before anyone understood its molecular mechanism?
- Why is vitamin K given routinely to newborns, and how does the anticoagulant warfarin exploit the same clotting pathway?
- Why was AZT originally synthesized in 1964, and why was it shelved before its use against HIV was discovered?
- Why was Enovid initially approved for menstrual disorders rather than contraception?
- Why was GLP-1's rapid destruction by plasma enzymes an obstacle to turning it into a drug?
- Why was LSD-25 originally synthesised as part of a search for circulation and respiration medicines?
- Why was compound 606 set aside and forgotten before Sahachiro Hata retested it?
- Why was curare, an arrow poison, useful for muscle relaxation during surgery?
- Why was the HPTN 052 trial halted early?
- Why were the original metathesis catalysts unsuitable for pharmaceutical chemistry, and how did Grubbs and Schrock fix that?
- Why would administering a substance rectally have been preferable to drinking it, pharmacologically speaking?
Sources
- Albert Hofmann synthesises LSD
- Albert Hofmann synthesizes LSD
- Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences
- Death of Oliver Sacks
- FDA approves AZT, the first antiretroviral drug for AIDS
- FDA approves first oral contraceptive pill
- First HIV protease inhibitor approved
- HPTN 052 trial shows antiretroviral treatment prevents HIV transmission
- Identification of histamine
- Ig Nobel Prize in Art History
- Ig Nobel Prize in Biology
- Ig Nobel Prize in Literature
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- Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine
- Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine
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- Ig Nobel Prize in Peace
- Ig Nobel Prize in Physics
- Lasker Award (Clinical Medical Research)
- Lasker Award (Clinical Medical Research)
- Lasker Award (Clinical Medical Research)
- Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research
- Nobel Prize in Chemistry
- Nobel Prize in Chemistry
- Nobel Prize in Chemistry
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- Nobel Prize in Chemistry
- Nobel Prize in Chemistry
- Nobel Prize in Chemistry
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- Nobel Prize in Chemistry
- Nobel Prize in Chemistry
- Nobel Prize in Chemistry
- Nobel Prize in Chemistry
- Nobel Prize in Chemistry
- Nobel Prize in Chemistry