Today, 23 January, marks the birthday of Gertrude B Elion, a chemist who jointly won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her work on drug treatments and the discovery of several drugs used to treat a variety of diseases. This graphic takes a look at some of the key medicines she discovered.
In the U.S in 2015, opioid overdoses were responsible for over 33,000 deaths. In this month’s edition of Periodic Graphics in Chemical & Engineering News, we take a look at the chemicals behind this surge in overdose deaths, and the treatments currently available to reverse opioid overdose and addiction. View the full graphic 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.
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life, but if a more stable version of a drug is discovered after it has reached the market, products may end up being withdrawn, costing money.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.
