How many of our drugs are extracts from other plants and animals? I assume it is over 60%, but I do not have an exact number.
This includes things like using genetic engineering to make insulin or growth hormone from bacteria (by inserting the gene for these chemicals into bacteria) as well as things like extracting aspirin from willow bark or penicillin from mold. If the actual drug itself was designed organically I consider it an extract.
The only one that I can think of offhand that wouldn’t be an extract from some plant/mold/fungus/bacteria is lithium, which is used to treat schizophrenics (I think).
I imagine that the vast majority (like over 99%) would come from other plants or animals.
I worked in the drug industry, but IANApharmacist/doc.
Tons of drugs are not of plant or animal origin. I suspect that those that are in the small minority.
Most are just plain chemical synthesis. They are not hard to manufacture. The hard part is finding the right chemicals in the first place: those that actually treat an illness without killing you.
The word “organic” has so many meanings these days. What exactly do you mean by this? If I synthetically make paclitaxel (Taxol®), which is produced naturally by the Pacific Yes, does that count? What if I make minor changes to the molecule? What if I make major changes to it? What if I try to mimic a peptide-based protein inhibitor with a compound made from beta amino acids? What if I utilize phage display and mutant transcriptases in a combi chem lab?
To try to answer your question, very few molecules are simply made up out of the blue for pharmacological purposes. Drugs are usually based on some sort of natural template. I can’t give you an exact number even if I knew exactly what you’re asking.
According to this article, there are “at least 120 distinct chemical substances derived from plants that are considered as important drugs currently in use in one or more countries in the world.” It also adds, “Some of the drug/chemicals shown below are still sold as plant based drugs requiring the processing of the actual plant material. Others have been chemically copied/synthesized by laboratories and no plant materials are used in the manufacture of the drug.” There’s a list there if you want to check it out. Of course, the article was written in 2000, and there’s research being done everyday, so the number may be higher by now.
I can’t find any similar easy info on animal origin. That one gets even trickier, because there’s some drugs which aren’t actually made out of animals, but require animal tissue as a growing medium. Others are made out of animal tissues or serum. A few, like Premarin, are made out of animal waste products.
What percentage of synthetic drugs are produced from plant or other organic predecessors? I imagine it must be the great majority; it’s hard to define “organic” in this context because most organic syntheses start with chemicals they derive from natural sources, no? Even if they do a great deal of chemical work on a molecule with entirely synthetic chemicals, it’s still a lot easier to get some basic precursors out of natural sources than from pure chemical means.
The amount of active ingredients actually “harvested” (technical term) from either the original plant/animal or a genetically modified bacteria is actually pretty small. Insulin is obtained this way; so are the aminoacids in protein shakes and the like, and some of the vitamins.
The amount that corresponds exactly to a molecule that exists in “nature”, was isolated from its natural source and then we learned how to make it from oil or sugars is huge, specially if you look at it in terms of tons produced. Taxol has been mentioned; AZT is another; the artificial synthesis of aspirin was both a medical and a chemical breakthrough (it was the first reaction to use “protecting groups”, which get added to the molecule at the beginning of the process and taken out again later).
The amount that corresponds to a molecule that “looks a lot like” one found in nature, and which is obtained by chemical synthesis, is the whole rest. Medication simply needs to be either a molecule that exists in the body or similar to one, in order to be able to interact with the body; that is, to work. The similarities may not be evident to the untrained, but without them it doesn’t work. The active ingredient in any household painkiller other than aspirin is just a modification of aspirin.
There are a few anti-cancer agents that do not have natural analogs (except by accident.) These would be cis-platin and related molecules, as well as some porphyrin-based molecules. Yes, there are porphyrins in nature, but I’m not sure that they have any therapeutic properties. Something like Texaphyrin is very much non-natural in that it has a 5-point core that can hold all sorts of nasties (like uranium, I think.)
Is EDTA (hexadentate ligand used to mop up metal overdoses) nature-based?