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
Because:
1. Biochemistry is *enormously* complex. Literally *millions* of compounds factor into some of the most basic things living cells do. We literally *don’t know* most of the biochemical reactions inside our bodies. We *barely* know the superficial surface of the really common reactions.
2. Drugs are not LEGOs that you can rebuild whenever and however you like. They have rules for their structures, rules we can’t just willy-nilly ignore. To get a different medicinal effect, you would have to *heavily* change the molecule–which may create all sorts of *new* side effects.
3. The receptor sites that respond to drugs are not like wall sockets or battery ports. Instead, receptor sites are like a dress code. There *are* rules for what is and isn’t allowed in, but the rules allow many variations. Sometimes you can even bend the rules by adding other things.
If drug companies *could* produce a drug with few to no side effects, they would. Because they’d be able to patent it and make a crapton of money, *especially* for something like steroids, where as you say the drugs are old, so a major innovation would be a very big deal.
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