Why do so many modern drugs have names that end in “umab”?

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What does it mean?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

It’s not specifically about new drugs generally, when you notice common recurrences of endings to medication names like this, that usually mean all those drugs with common endings are all part of the same type of drug

-mab is short for “monoclonal antibody”, it’s a type of drug where they basically inject you with antibodies (yes antibodies like your immune system makes…mostly, there’s a bit of nuance here) to create a targeted strike on a particular thing. Obviously a type of drug based on the idea of attacking a very specific type of thing could be useful for a lot of stuff

The reason it seems like “all new drugs” are -mab drugs is because we’ve just made a lot of progress with monoclonal antibodies as a class of drugs, and they’re super useful so you’re seeing a lot of new drugs utilizing this approach.

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