Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Statement 19.6, therefore, entails classifying drugs into at least two groups - (1)
drugs composed of pure chemicals to be called “Type I drugs,” and (2) drugs
composed of two or more compounds of known or unknown structures to be
referred to as “Type II drugs.” Using these new terms, Statement 19.6 may be
more succinctly expressed as follows:
Unlike the traditional method of drug discovery which is limited to finding Type I drugs,
the ribonoscopic method can identify both Type I and Type II drugs. (19.7)
It should be noted that, according to the
First Law of Theragnostics
, Statements
19.2-19.4,
Both Type I and Type II drugs produce their therapeutic effects by affecting intracellular
dissipative structures or ic-dissipatons. (19.8)
For convenience, Statement 19.8 may be referred to as the
Second Law of
Theragnostics
.
The formulation of the
Second Law of Theragnostics
was greatly stimulated
by the informative lecture that Carl P. Decicco of Bristol-Myers Squibb delivered
at the Chemistry Department at Rutgers in May 2010. I take the liberty of
reproducing the email below that I sent to Dr. Decicco about a week after his
lecture. This email discusses dividing drugs into two groups referred to as the “first-
order” or “linear drugs” and “n
th
-order” or “nonlinear drugs,” which correspond,
respectively, to Type I and Type II drugs in Statement 19.8.
Dear Dr. Decicco,
...
I am the one who asked the question after your talk about whether or not your
group at BMS tried to develop a set of chemicals acting as a unit to prevent
blood clotting, rather than focusing exclusively on discovering a single
chemical agent such as
Apixaban
as an anticoagulant.
The reason I asked that question is to challenge the efficacy of the tradi-
tional one-molecule-based approach to drug discovery which, from the per-
spective of theoretical cell biology (TCB), seems antiquated. The emerging
TCB perspective (described in Molecular Theory of the Living Cell:
Concepts, Molecular Mechanisms, and Biomedical Applications, Springer,
New York, to appear in 2010-2011) suggests that the real biological/patho-
logical processes are often too complex to be affected by any single chemical
agent and hence a more realistic approach may be to try to identify a set of
(instead of single) chemicals that act as the effective therapeutic unit. For
convenience, we may refer to this idea as the “one-to-many paradigm shift in
drug discovery” or “1-to-many PSDD” for short. As you pointed out, such
approaches have already been proven effective in some combination therapies
worked out in BMS and elsewhere. But the traditional combination therapeu-
tic agents, as far as I know, are composed of already FDA-approved drugs.
(continued)
