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Category: Drugs
Posted on: January 14, 2008 9:19 PM, by Molecule of the Day
I love the story of valproate. About fifty years ago, an investigator was using a fatty carboxylic acid as a delivery vehicle for antiseizure medications. He looked at it alone in controls and, lo and behold, it was a drug on its own:
It's a humbling reminder to anyone who's ever designed a drug: we are not as S-M-R-T as we think we are.
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Comments
Yeah! You're back! I was worried that you may have abandoned us. I just recently found your blog, and I love it:)
Posted by: Byrd | January 14, 2008 11:15 PM
"It's a humbling reminder to anyone who's ever designed a drug: we are not as S-M-R-T as we think we are." You can get this in spades at In the Pipeline, a blog on the pharmaceutical industry from the perspective of a bench chemist.
Posted by: John Spevacek | January 15, 2008 1:02 PM
A fun offshoot was loading tiny Alzet osmotic pumps for animal sustained direct brain dosing studies. The acid has crappy water solubility, the sodium salt is highly alkaline. They couldn't get enough pH-buffered aqueous solution into the pump to do a decent study.
Wonderful minimalist answer! Dissolve the Na salt in the neat acid to buffer pH of pump micro-effluent when it hit biology.
Posted by: Uncle Al | January 15, 2008 3:22 PM
I forgot to comment when you first posted this but that valproic acid story is a great one to teach students about why we run vehicle control groups in all of our studies, no matter the system.
Posted by: Abel Pharmboy | January 26, 2008 5:21 PM