How do pathologists start searching for elements which could possibly be a cure for whenever a new viral or bacterial epidemic breaches? Do they like start from A till Z of the list of elements to find out which reacts to the pathogen or something?
In: Biology
At least according to common career definitions, pathologists don’t real do this sort of job. That’s more for microbiologists/virologists/parasitologists/etc.
And they usually start by looking at the evolutionary origin of the pathogen. Where did it come from? What other microbe did it speciate from? If we know, what did we use for that parent microbe? Etc.
For bacteria it’s easy, you have a lot of antibiotics, and we know how they work, so we know which type of bacteria they’d work on and which not. Like bacteria with a cell wall and those without. From there on it’s trial and error in a petri dish (or the human, but that’s not recommended as if it doesn’t work you get resistance).
For viruses it’s more complicated. Mostly because we don’t have any real cures for almost any viruses. We have some treatments that make things better, but I think we don’t have any true cure. So either we use the approach above and use drugs we know their mechanism and that they apply to this class of viruses, or we treat the symptoms until the body gets rid of the virus.
For other stuff like fungi and parasites I believe we follow the same concept, rely on previous evolutionary ancestors that we do have a treatment for.
And if in any of these cases we don’t know what to use there are always general drugs for the specific pathogen that we can try.
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