Semester:Week 2This week one of our very own, an Andrews alumnus of the Chemistry Department of 1993, Dr. Brain Johns came to present on the topic of discovery and development of an HIV drug. Dr. Johns is the director of HIV Medicinal & DMPK, GlaxoSmithKline at Research Triangle Park in North Carolina. Dr. Johns' presentation was very interesting, targeting the area of chemistry I am most intrigued with, biochemistry. He presented well and was quite engaged, being well verse in his field and knowledgeable of his subject matter. Both the content and the delivery of the content allowed for an enjoyable presentation by Dr. Johns.Dr. Johns taught us the basic process it takes for a drug to go from an idea to the market, a process that generally takes about 10 to 15 years in duration. He went through all the steps from idea to market, steps 1 and 2 interesting me the most. Step 1 is disease selection, which of course is where the disease to target is selected, for whatever reason. When explaining why they chose HIV Dr. Johns emphasized that at that point in time, drugs for HIV were an unmet daily need, though right now there are many retroviral medicines available. They had many qualifications they wanted their drug to possess, one being that it would be a once a day medication (qd). Step 2 is target selection. At this step, researchers choose where they want the drug to target. With diseases, there are many pathways, and factors involved in its proliferation and inhibition, allowing for many target options. Choosing one involves deciding which one shows lots of promise, assessing the information already known about that target and deciding if it can be done. They realized that catalyzing biochemical reactions are a great place to inhibit enzymes, and that was how they designed their drug to work.This is just a small nugget of the talk, but it was insightful indeed and much appreciated.
