Question: What are the steps involved in making new treatments

Sergio Martin Saldana answered on 19 Nov 2019:

Really nice question!! Making new treatments is a really long process. First, we need to select a target (lets say a molecule that is more present in a particular disease than in a healthy person). Then we need to developed a drug that could acts on this particular target and deeply characterized it in terms of effect, degradation etc. After this we have to test this drug candidate on healthy cells and see if it is toxic or not, and after this on relevant cells could mimic the disease and study its performance. Finally, we would need to test the effect on animal models, and if everything goes well, we can move forward to clinical trials (on humans). As you can imagine it takes years for the whole development 🙂