I'm a Scientist, Get me out of Here! Ireland

Automated apparatus to prepare pharamceutical liquid oral doses | Image via Wikimedia/Flagrange

In order to improve our life-span and life quality, scientists are frequently coming up with new treatments for various kinds of illnesses, many of which will be a new drug.

The first part of the process of developing a new drug is to find the main compound or molecule which works against a disease. The next step is to make sure that this compound isn’t harmful to the body. When they think that the drug is safe they begin human clinical trials. If the drug can be proved to work then a company will package it up and sell it around the world.

But where does this first compound comes from? And how do scientists scale the process up to produce large quantities of it, so it is widely available? Medicines need to be manufactured in an efficient and reproducible way, so that the aspirin we took to help us with cold last winter is exactly the same as the aspirin we might need this one. We’ll talk to chemists about how they synthesize drugs to diagnose and treat disease.

In this zone we’ll talk to a scientist developing new medicines for cancer or rare diseases, finding new effective ways for producing medicines, or researching new vaccines.