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Asked by Hasafan to Áine, Ciarán, Eoin, Lydia, Victoria on 11 Nov 2014.
Question: How are medicines made?
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Lydia Bach answered on 11 Nov 2014:
Hello!
In the past 100s of years ago, medicines were mostly made from plants and herbs! Often there were people, medicine men, who knew which herb would cure what alignment and they would pass their knowledge on! These people got it right mostly: for example the indigenous Quechua people of the Peruvian Amazon would use the bark of a tree called cinchona to treat malaria. That bark actually contains a chemical called quinine, a white powder, which we use now to treat malaria!
Later people would start to experiment with and use chemicals to produce medicines! That’s how scientists were able to make quinine from the different components its made of in the lab, and not from the cinchona tree!
Now scientists keep trying to find new chemicals and compounds that can become medicines, test them and produce them at industrial scales!
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Ciarán O'Brien answered on 11 Nov 2014:
Some medicines are made by chemists or chemical engineers, that set up big vats of chemicals and cause reactions between them to make what they want.
Others are made by bacteria, and biotechnology scientists set them up to grow in big “bioreactors” (just a fancy name for a tank full of food for bacteria that can be refilled), and siphon off the chemicals they produce.
Some of the most interesting medicines are actually viruses! Viruses grow anywhere you can find any other living things. Even the bacteria that cause infections have viruses looking to kill them, so some clever scientists in Russia figured that if they grew dangerous bacteria correctly, they could harvest the viruses that kill them and use them to treat infections. They were right, and it’s really caught on as a treatment in recent years.
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