• Question: @all why didn't any of you not go into pharmacology to try to directly make cures for illnesses?

    Asked by anon-358591 on 15 Mar 2023.
    • Photo: Orode Aniejurengho

      Orode Aniejurengho answered on 15 Mar 2023:

      Hello, I did work in drug discovery and we focused on drugs for cancer. A job title may not directly say pharmacology but there are other job titles were you can find cures for different illnesses. Even during my PhD, I was studying ways we could treat urinary tract infections.

    • Photo: Hannah Tanner

      Hannah Tanner answered on 15 Mar 2023:

      I thought about doing pharmacy, but I just wasn’t that good at chemistry.

    • Photo: Edward Guy

      Edward Guy answered on 15 Mar 2023: last edited 15 Mar 2023 11:01 am

      Diagnosing disease is an important step before treating a patient with the right drugs, and most of my research has been around developing new and better diagnostic tests and how best to use them. Diagnostic tests can also be very important in monitoring whether a treatment is working or not.

      Also, prevention is much better than cure, so vaccine research is also very important in addition to drug development.

    • Photo: Silvia Mazzotta

      Silvia Mazzotta answered on 15 Mar 2023:

      There are different ways to cure disease. Pharmacology is very much based on chemistry, and I enjoyed biology more than chemistry in school and at university. But we can use biology to cure disease as well. For example, some of my early work involved making beating heart muscle cells in a dish, and the hope is that one day cells similar to the ones I was making could be used to help people who had a heart attack. Similarly, I worked for a company that was using cells to fight cancer…so cures for illnesses can be made also from biologists, not just pharmacologists.

    • Photo: Kirstie Andrews

      Kirstie Andrews answered on 15 Mar 2023:

      I found that there are so many unknowns in illnesses- why certain people get them and others don’t, what makes the illnesses happen, what is the likely best way to cure them, etc- that I wanted to look at the questions that would provide the underlying information. I wanted to add knowledge to these unknowns and this can then be used by, for example, pharmacologists to make the best cure possible.

    • Photo: Jacob Wildfire

      Jacob Wildfire answered on 15 Mar 2023:

      As someone who works on antibiotic resistance, drug development is certainly an avenue that I could have gone down to help fix the problem. But, it’s a short term solution. Bacteria can share resistance between each other, and resistance can develop against a new antibiotic within a year!

      So, I chose to explore WHY is this resistance developing and spreading, in the hopes that it’ll lead to more long term solutions – so we can use new drugs for longer!

    • Photo: Benjamin Foster

      Benjamin Foster answered on 22 Mar 2023:

      Often, fundamental science is a key cornerstone to understand basic biology or the biochemistry involved in a particular process. This enhances the knowledge of signalling pathways, for example, that are relevant to pathologies or diseases, such as cancer in the case of DNA repair for example. This provides key knowledge to understand what factors could be targeted by drugs to treat particular diseases, which is where more pharmacology or translational research can be carried out.

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