what are “biologicals” and how do they differ from regular medications?
In: Biology
In simple terms, biologicals are drugs that are made by biology rather than chemistry. Rather than getting chemicals and mixing them together to create what you want, you get some organism (a single-celled bacteria, yeast or something similar) and genetically programme it to make the thing you want.
There may be some more nuances to it (penicillin started out as coming from a biological thing, but now is mostly made via chemistry, and then you get things that are a mixture), but that’s the general idea.
Medicines are usually “small molecules” which, like the name sounds like, are small. Less than ~500 daltons (a measure of molecular weight, where carbon is 12, oxygen is 16, etc.). So they can be ingested, and absorbed in the stomach or intestines. Aspirin is an example.
Biologicals are much, much larger. They tend to be proteins, or specifically, antibodies (but not always). Because of that they tend to need to be injected because they would be digested if you ate them.
The main functional difference is that biologicals are much more specific for their target. They also act in very different ways, but probably thats more than we need to go into for an eli5.
“Biological” in this context means that the active ingredient is produced by a living organism.
Most medicin we can synthesise, that is, we know how to do a string of different chemical reactions, and by the end we have a medication that works.
The active compounds in biologicals are typically large, complex molecules. Rather than try to figure out how to synthesise them, we have genetically engineered another organism, like a bacterium or a fungi, to produce it for us.
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