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Asked by to Daren on 17 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
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Daren Fearon answered on 17 Jun 2014:
Sadly, not (yet anyway). Drug discovery is a long process, it takes an average of 12 years from the initial work to the drug being approved for use in people. I am still in the early stages of my career, I studied science for 9 year but only finished my PhD 2 years ago and have been working as research associate since. So I haven’t been working long enough to discover any drugs that will have reached the stage where they can be used in people. I work in the very early part of a drug discovery project, where we are identifying new targets and finding new molecules and I have discovered molecules that could lead to new drugs in the future. However, most potential drugs fail during clinical trials and we don’t have good ways to predict which ones will fail (yet). So even if I find a really promising molecule it still might not make it as a drug.
That doesn’t mean I’m not working hard so maybe one day I can say I have played a part in the discovery of a new drug!
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Comments
caitlinconvey commented on :
Wow thank you! I didn’t know how long it took!