• Question: How much more effective are the treatment you are testing When compared with other drugs on their own

    Asked by anon-256904 to Tiffany on 11 Jun 2020.
    • Photo: Tiffany Chan

      Tiffany Chan answered on 11 Jun 2020: last edited 11 Jun 2020 8:27 am

      Hi Alex – I think we spoke about this yesterday, but here’s a longer answer!

      It’s actually quite a complicated thing to predict as, for example, many drugs have multiple targets (e.g. they may bind to a particular protein in order to work the way we want, but may also be binding to other things), scientists are not 100% sure how many drugs achieve their function, and you also have to balance side-effects (e.g. if a drug works but sometimes leads to headaches, you probably don’t want to be using it with another drug that may cause headaches!)

      We are mostly trying to do unbiased screens, where we screen all sorts of drugs against our radioactive one, which means that we will find combinations that work better…and also those that make things worse! (We start by doing this in cells so that we can rule out any combinations that don’t work. We can then take the combinations that look like they’re working and test them further/investigate the biology behind how they might be working together.)

      Hope that answers your question – but feel free to message again if it doesn’t! 🙂

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