This question came about as my wife has just started a course of steroids to treat her Crohn’s Disease. They work amazingly well, amazingly quickly… But they are only a temporary solution as they have a range of significant side effects such as thinning of the bones, insomnia, etc…
Steroids are “old” in medical terms – why haven’t we managed to remove the side effects yet?
In: Chemistry
Biology is absurdly, mind-bogglingly complex. It almost has to be, given that every biological system that exists today cobbled itself together out of previous pieces, so to speak. Almost every system in your body is controlled by several different signalling pathways, and almost every signalling pathway in your body helps control several different systems. If you make a minor change to one particular pathway with a drug/peptide/biologic/etc, it’s almost certainly going to have effects on other systems. At its heart, biology is based on chemical reactions, and sometimes we can’t make those reactions happen the way we need them to.
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