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Medicine development and safety testing

If the structure of a medicine is altered slightly, this will slightly alter the medicine's properties. This means when a useful activity has been identified, chemists will make many similar compounds called analogues, to try and maximise the beneficial effects. This development phase can take up to 3 years typically and is expensive.

These new analogues need to be developed. It needs to be determined how safe the medicine is for human consumption, its stability in the human body and the best form for dispensing, like tablet or aerosol. After lots of testing, which can take up to 6 years the new medicine is ready for marketing.

As a result of the long time required to develop analogues and test a new medicine and the fact that of every 5000 potential new medicines typically only one will ever reach the open market, this is an expensive way of doing things, costing millions of pounds. To recoup this outlay pharmaceutical companies may do a number of things:

• Carefully research the demand for their potential new product before spending an outlay of company funds.
• Obtain a patent on the new medicine preventing other companies from producing that medicine for a certain allocation of time.

Carboxylic acids

Carboxylic acids contain the functional group. HCOOH. Their systematic names all end with -oic acid.

• Name

1. Methanoic acid (one carbon)
2. Propanoic acid (3 carbons)
3. Benzene carboxylic (benzoic) acid (7 carbons)
4. 2-methylpropanoic acid (CH₃)₂CHCOOH
5. Ethanedioic acid (COOH)₂

Reactions

1. Acid-base reactions:

Being weak acids, carboxylic acids partially dissociate in aqueous solution to form oxonium ions (H₃0⁺) and carboxylate ions (RCOO^-):

HCOOH(aq) + H₂0(l) <> H₃0(l)⁺(aq) + HCOO^-(aq)
Methanoic base oxonium ion methanoate ion
acid