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Asked by Cubey123 to Eleni, Hannah, Jenny, Oli, Steven on 11 Nov 2016.
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Oliver Charity answered on 11 Nov 2016:
Hi Cubey,
That would be very difficult as all medical issues are caused by very different processes. There are certian therapies and drugs that can treat mutliple conditions, such as amitriptyline which is used as pain medicine, anxiety medicine, depression medicine, to help people with obsessive compulsive disorder, or drugs which target certain virues families which use a certian protein to replicate, so inhibiting this protein potentially stops all of them!
A problem with medication is finding one that only treats the specific problem, without causing other effects. A medication that treated all disease would be doing many more than one process in the body, so would have hundreds of nasty side effects.
Oli
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Hannah Bolt answered on 11 Nov 2016:
Hi Cubey123,
The body is an incredibly complex thing and all diseases and medical issues are caused by different things. Therefore, although it would be lovely if this were possible, I think it would be almost impossible to create one drug or medicine to cure all diseases!
There are many drugs that can treat multiple illnesses. For example, lots of illnesses can be caused by parasitic worm infections. There are 5 anti-worm treatments used by doctors currently, and each of these 5 drugs can treat any of the different worm infections possible in humans.
Hannah
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Jenny Batson answered on 12 Nov 2016:
Hi
It probably won’t be possible to cure multiple diseases with one drug but some diseases are caused by similar mechanisms so it might be possible to treat several diseases with similar drugs. For example the drugs we are developing inhibit blood vessel growth and this is involved in vascular eye disease, most cancers and diabetic complications such as kidney disease so we are trying to develop compounds in all of these diseases. We will need to tailor them to different diseases and patients but we hope that the approach might work in several diseases!
Jenny -
Steven Street answered on 12 Nov 2016:
Hi Cubey123,
That’s an excellent question, with some excellent responses!
Creating one drug that could cure all medical issues would be nigh on impossible due to the multitude of different causes for all of the medical issues out there!
As the others have suggested, it is possible to treat several different illnesses with the same drug if the illnesses all have the same underlying cause though.
In my case, I am targeting DNA structures that can inhibit the telomerase enzyme, which could be used for the treatment of cancer. There are also over 700,000 G-quadruplex DNA structures inside the human genome, and even more across all strands of nature! We don’t know what they all do, but several of them could be used to treat other illnesses. For example there is a G-quadruplex in the HIV virus that can stop replication, and there is another in the Zika virus that could do the same… as well as others in bacteria, and even plants! With more research, a molecule that target’s these structures could in theory be used in many different diseases, providing it doesn’t display unwanted side effects as Oli said!
Steve
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Eleni Vikeli answered on 15 Nov 2016:
Hi,
I agree with everyone. Also, even if something like that was possible , that would mean that it would attack so many targets that most likely it would also attack human cells!
Eleni
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