May is Hepatitis Awareness Month in the U.S. This month’s edition of Periodic Graphics in C&EN looks at some of the basics of hepatitis and its different types, as well as how the drugs used to treat the disease have changed over the years. Click through to download the full graphic on the C&EN site.
It’s coming around to the time of year when hay fever strikes! Here’s a look at the chemical cause, and at how some of the medicines you can take to alleviate the symptoms actually work. You can see the full graphic over on the C&EN site.
In 2012, the most recent year for which the information is available, there were 8.2 million cancer-related deaths worldwide. Chemotherapy is a common treatment resort, but it’s by no means a magic bullet, and this is often due to chemoresistance. This latest Chemunicate graphic, made on behalf of Thomas Fleming at the University of Oxford, looks at how understanding this process can help chemists develop new drugs to tackle the problem.
24 March is World Tuberculosis Day. Tuberculosis is curable and preventable – yet 1.8 million people died as a result of it in 2015 alone, meaning it ranks alongside HIV as the world’s most deadly infectious disease. This graphic take a look at the basics of the disease, and how it can be treated.
When pharmaceutical companies manufacture a drug, finding the drug’s most stable form is important. Not only do drugs become less effective as they degrade, limiting their useful shelf life, but if a more stable version of a drug is discovered after it has reached the market, products may end up being withdrawn, costing money. As a result, chemists are developing methods to evaluate drug stability, and using a “Full Interaction Maps” tool is one such computational method.
This latest Chemunicate graphic (the Compound Interest side project that works with chemistry researchers and institutions to highlight their research in graphical form) was made for the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre, and takes a look at a particular computational method that can be used to assist in the discovery of drug molecules.