Prominent drugs with less side effects
Chemical
compounds are made
up of molecules. Chiral molecules are one of the most important molecules in
biology. Meaning of Chiral in Greek represents the hand which describes that
molecules that almost exactly looks alike and contain the same number of atoms
but are mirror images of one another which means some are
"left-handed" and others are "right-handed." This
difference is crucial and yields different biological effects. The differences
of the Chiral was made clear by drug thalidomide. It was later marketed to pregnant women in
the late 1950’s and 1960’s to get relief from morning sickness. However,
thalidomide is a chiral drug, the “right” chiral molecule of it causes relief
from morning sickness and its “left” chiral molecule caused deformities in
babies. Since the left chiral molecule was not separated from the right chiral
molecule in thalidomide by the drug company, it resulted in huge effect to the
babies inside the womb. The separation of chiral molecules into their right and
left chiral components becomes very expensive procedure and needs tailor made
approach for each of the molecule. Now, however, by the series of research
undertaken, uniform, generic method is undertaken which will enable
pharmaceutical and chemical manufactures to cheaply delete the left chiral
molecule to reduce the side effects. The method is based on magnets. Chiral
molecules attract to the magnetic substrate and line up according to the
direction of their right and left handedness. Left chiral molecules is
attracted to one pole of the magnet and right molecule to the other pole. This process
allows the chemical manufacturers to discard the left molecule and retain the
right molecule which reduces the side effect. Some of the popular drugs like
Ritalin and Cipramil are sold in their chirally pure form, while many of the
generic medicines are not. Though it has been recommended by the FDA, only 1e%
of the chiral drugs are been separated as of now. Chirally-pure pesticides and
fertilizers needs smaller doses in the field of agrochemicals which leads to
less environmental contamination when compared to their unseparated
counterparts. With these statistics the simple and cost effective chiral separation
process is able to produce better medical and agricultural products, including
drugs, food ingredients, dietary supplements and fertilizers.
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