• Question: How long would you normally spend in a lab trying to create a medicine for a sickness before it is tested and safe?

    Asked by anon-258506 to Tiffany, Stuart on 9 Jul 2020.
    • Photo: Tiffany Chan

      Tiffany Chan answered on 9 Jul 2020:

      Hi Isabel! On average, it takes at least 10 years for a medicine to make it from the lab to the marketplace (and can cost several billions). Most potential drug candidates in the lab actually never make it – there are many tests that need to be done! Typically, you have to show that your drug works in cells, then in animals (if there is an appropriate model), and then in humans. Testing in humans can take 6-7 years itself as you first have to show that it’s safe in healthy humans before you can actually test it on a sick person.

Comments

  • Photo: Aisling

    Aisling commented on :

    In terms of us scientists making the medicine in the lab it could take anything from one month to a few years depending on how it goes. (Sometimes you design a way to do it and it works well and other times it can be a total nightmare trying to get it to work.) I have one project that took me less than six months to make the medicines and they are doing really well in the testing stage- they are killing cancer cells and stopping them from spreading! But I have another project that I have been working on for nearly a year and I keep on getting to a certain stage and then the next part won’t work (think of building a tower and each piece has to fit in perfectly but if you get to a certain stage and none of your remaining pieces fit you have the knock the tower down and try and build it a different way using your pieces in a different order to see if that works better.)
    Once you make the medicine it then gets tested. I’ll use my research as an example but the testing process will depend the on the disease. For cancer, cancer cells are grown in a dish and the medicines I make are added in. If the medicines can kill the cancer more effectively than a medicine that is used in clinics and hospitals then it is worth pursuing. So, generally I will investigate a few more things that the medicine is able to do and then I will move onto basic animal testing, which is usually done on mice. The reason this is done is because cells in a plate and cells in a living thing are in different environments, and although the medicine may be amazing at killing cancer cells when they are alone on a plate, they could be really bad at killing them when they are hidden in a live animal with lots of other things going on in the body at the same time. We also want to make sure the medicine won’t harm the animal’s organs etc. If the medicines work on animals then they can be taken into clinical trials which is where the testing on people begins. This is far removed from the scientist (like me) who made the medicine in the lab in the first place. I wouldn’t be involved anymore. The clinical trials would be run in a private company and could take 10-20 years and cost millions of euro/pounds/dollars. The process is very long, but that’s because we need to investigate how the medicine works properly and make sure there are no really bad side effects before it is approved and given to patients. Hope this answers your question! 🙂 Let me know if you’d like anything explained in more detail 🙂