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In the fields of medicine, biotechnology, and pharmacology, drug discovery is the process by which new candidate medications are discovered. [ 1 ] Historically, drugs were discovered by identifying the active ingredient from traditional remedies or by serendipitous discovery, as with penicillin .
A medication (also called medicament, medicine, pharmaceutical drug, medicinal product, medicinal drug or simply drug) is a drug used to diagnose, cure, treat, or prevent disease. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] Drug therapy ( pharmacotherapy ) is an important part of the medical field and relies on the science of pharmacology for continual advancement and on ...
Crude drugs are the dried, unprepared material of plant, animal or mineral origin, used for medicine. The study of these materials under the name Pharmakognosie was first developed in German-speaking areas of Europe, while other language areas often used the older term materia medica taken from the works of Galen and Dioscorides .
The number of people who benefit from a drug determines if drug trials are worth carrying out, given that phase III trials may cost between $100 million and $700 million per drug. This is the motivation behind personalized medicine, that is, to develop drugs that are adapted to individual patients. [19]
The word pharmacy is derived from Old French farmacie "substance, such as a food or in the form of a medicine which has a laxative effect" from Medieval Latin pharmacia from Greek pharmakeia (Ancient Greek: φαρμακεία) "a medicine", which itself derives from pharmakon (φάρμακον), meaning "drug, poison, spell" [44] [45] [a ...
Drug design, often referred to as rational drug design or simply rational design, is the inventive process of finding new medications based on the knowledge of a biological target. [1] The drug is most commonly an organic small molecule that activates or inhibits the function of a biomolecule such as a protein , which in turn results in a ...
Formulation studies involve developing a preparation of the drug which is both stable and acceptable to the patients. For orally administered drugs, this usually involves incorporating the drug into a tablet or a capsule. It is important to make the distinction that a tablet contains a variety of other potentially inert substances apart from ...
A drug class is a group of medications and other compounds that share similar chemical structures, act through the same mechanism of action (i.e., binding to the same biological target), have similar modes of action, and/or are used to treat similar diseases.