Many people who take medication with regular frequency would like to increase as much as possible the intervals between the times of taking the medication. This ambition may come true in the future, thanks to a new method developed by Weizmann Institute scientists
Prof. Yoram Schechter (right) and Prof. Mati Friedkin. Organic corks
Many people who take medication with regular frequency would like to increase as much as possible the intervals between the times of taking the medication. This ambition may come true in the future, thanks to a new method developed by Weizmann Institute scientists, which enables regulation of the activity of drugs in the body. When a person takes any medicine, the concentration of this medicine in his blood increases, sometimes up to a hundred times what is needed for the effective activity of the medicine. This causes waste and unwanted side effects. Still, these are the amounts given to patients, in order to ensure the presence of the drug in the blood for the period of time necessary for its activity. The medicinal substance dissipates and disappears, usually, within a few minutes to a few hours. After that, the patient must receive another dose of medicine. This process, of ups and downs in the level of the drug's presence in the blood, takes place over and over again, causing the patient discomfort and sometimes dysfunction. To increase the duration of the drug's presence in the blood, and to avoid fluctuations
Sharpness in the concentration of the medicinal substance, Prof. Matathiu Friedkin from the Department of Organic Chemistry at the Weizmann Institute of Science, and Prof. Yoram Shechter from the Department of Biological Chemistry at the Weizmann Institute of Science, are developing a new method for assembling medicinal substances, including antibiotics and cancer drugs. The method is based on attaching a molecular "plug" to the molecule of the medicinal substance. The "cork" does not allow the drug molecule to work.
When the "blocked" medicinal substance enters the bloodstream, the molecular "plugs" begin to break down, which releases the medicine and allows it to work. The institute's scientists have developed a variety of "plugs" that differ in their rate of disintegration, so that some of them disintegrate quickly and some disintegrate only after a few hours.
In this way, at any given moment, a constant amount of medicinal substance is released into the blood, which in the future may, perhaps, allow for a considerable increase in the intervals between the times of taking the medicines. The scientists also discovered that drugs attached to molecular "caps" are broken down by the various enzymes more slowly, compared to the rate of disintegration of normal drugs. The researchers hypothesize that they also stick to various proteins found in the blood, and that this allows them to exist in the bloodstream for a longer time, and to "evade" the various elimination mechanisms. In the article describing the
In the research of Prof. Friedkin, Prof. Shechter and research student Eitan Gershunov, which was accepted for publication in the journal "Diabetes", the scientists showed that rats treated with insulin that had a molecular "cork" attached to it
Be content with one insulin injection every two days. For comparison: regular insulin should be given to rats twice a day. However, the long-acting insulin developed by the institute's scientists,
It cannot be a substitute for insulin preparations designed to act quickly. The molecular "cork" is, in fact, the valve of a small organic fragrance. The institute's scientists are developing a way to control the rate of disintegration of the "cork" molecules and to determine it in advance, by changing a number of components in the molecule. The rate of release (or disintegration) of the clot has been tested so far in a "test tube", and will soon be tested in animal experiments. The company "Yade", which deals with the implementation of the results of the research of Weizmann Institute of Science scientists, together with the private investment fund PMOT, recently established a new start-up company - "Lapid Pharmaceuticals Ltd" - with the aim of developing the method and implementing it.
