Question: Is it economical to use this technology in medicine?

Lynne Thomas answered on 17 Jun 2014:

Hi crazykitten352. The answer to the question is that it already is being used in medicine. The challenge of finding a treatment for a disease isn’t just in finding the right molecule to do a job. Your body is a complex thing and you have to have a way to get the medicine into your body and to the right place to fix the problem that you are having. A lot of medicines fail to get into the shops because they can’t find a way of giving it to you!

The easiest (and cheapest) way to take a medicine is by swallowing a tablet. A tablet is a solid and therefore made of crystals! How the molecules arrange themselves in the crystal affects things like how well the medicine will dissolve in your blood (the easiest route to transport medicines around your body) and also how well it forms into a tablet. Paracetamol for instance, on its own, doesn’t form good tablets, they fall apart. So they have to add something else to make the tablets so they mix in chalk for the cheap version!

There is actually not just one way to make a crystal of something. Imagine that you are tiling a driveway with bricks. You can either put them all parallel to each other like a brick wall or they can be tilted (called herring-bone) to make a prettier pattern. Both use the same size and shaped brick and fill your driveway. The same thing happens with molecules and you can put them into the solid in different ways – its called polymorphism. This can really affect how soluble the medicine is!

Big companies spend a lot of time and effort looking at these things so if we can find other ways to help, then maybe more medicines will make it through to the shops!