Have you ever wondered how the active ingredients in a pain reliever know to target your headache pain? Or perhaps how a hypertension medicine knows to work with your body to bring your blood pressure down? The mechanisms behind how drugs work is fascinating.
In reality, drugs are just bunches of molecules packaged together. They are not living organisms with minds of their own. Therefore, when you swallow a pill, its molecules don’t magically know where to go. Drugs accomplish their tasks by binding to cells in such a way as to promote a reaction.
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Active and Inactive Ingredients
In any drug there are both active and inactive ingredients. Active ingredients are those designed to address a particular medical problem. Inactive ingredients do other things:
- Stabilize active ingredients
- Prevent premature degradation
- Facilitate digestion and absorption
- Alter texture, flavor, etc.
It is the job of the pharmaceutical scientist to come up with the right combination of ingredients that will make a drug easily administered and effective for the task at hand.
A number of different pharmaceutical jobs all have a role in the process of identifying ingredients, coming up with formulas, and testing the results. According to the people behind the Pharma Diversity job board, it takes an army of research scientists and technicians years to develop new drugs.
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Investigating Different Delivery Methods
In addition to coming up with formulas, pharmaceutical scientists also need to settle on the best possible delivery method. So many of our medications are administered through pills. But ingesting pills is not always the best way to go.
The concern in most cases is absorption. When medication is taken orally, it first enters the stomach and then must be processed by the digestive system. It is nearly impossible to get 100% absorption this way. But there are plenty of medications that work just fine with lower absorption levels.
When medication is administered through injection or intravenously, it is immediately put into circulation. The drug quickly makes its way around the body and begins binding to those cells that will help it achieve its goal.
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Binding Produces Reactions
Why do drug makers want drug molecules to bind to cells? Because binding produces reactions. The molecules in an acetaminophen tablet bind to certain sections of certain cells, thereby triggering an analgesic response in the body. The result is pain relief.
A good comparison would be a deodorizing spray that actually eliminates odors. Some sprays simply mask odors with heavy perfumes. But odor eliminators do something different. Their molecules bind to odor molecules in such a way that the human nose can no longer smell the odors. Binding one molecule to another changes the game.
This is the way prescription drugs do what they do. Their chief mechanism is to bind to cells so that the body is encouraged to react in a certain way.
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Why There Are Side Effects
This process of binding to cells also explains why drugs tend to have side effects. As previously stated, not all the active ingredients in a drug get absorbed by the body. That can create side effects in the digestive system as well as the liver, colon, etc.
As for other side effects, they are the results of molecules binding to cells other than those originally targeted. This cannot be helped. As the drug circulates throughout the body, there is going to be unintentional binding.
Now you know how drugs do what they do. They do not have minds of their own, they are designed to bind to cells to promote a reaction.
