In the past hundred years, the average life span of human beings has been greatly extended. In addition to the improvement of living conditions, another main reason is the continuous improvement of medical standards. The continuous advent of various therapeutic drugs is a prerequisite for the improvement of medical standards.
Medicine is a special product that is closely related to human life and is the patron saint of life. Its development process has been full of ups and downs. The magical preparation process and production technology are the crystallization of human wisdom.
In distant ancient times, people knew that willow bark had certain antipyretic and analgesic effects, but they did not know what the active ingredients were. It was not until 1800 that someone extracted an antipyretic and analgesic effect from willow bark. An active ingredient called salicylic acid.
In the following decades, in order to overcome the side effects of the drug in clinical applications and expand its therapeutic scope, technical experts in the industry made many improvements to the extraction and synthesis process of aspirin, and the active ingredient was changed from salicylic acid to acetyl Salicylic acid, the dosage form has been developed into enteric-coated sustained-release tablets.
Since its clinical application, this drug has saved tens of millions of lives, eliminated or alleviated the pain of countless people, and created the immortal legend of a century-old drug, aspirin.
Before penicillin officially became a clinical drug, humans were at a loss to treat bacterial infections. Tuberculosis alone has claimed tens of millions of lives in history. At that time, when tuberculosis was mentioned, people turned pale when talking about it.
In fact, the scientist Alexander Fleming accidentally discovered penicillin in an experiment in 1928. However, the biological culture technology was backward at that time. The key was the lack of efficient and practical separation and purification processes, which made it impossible to obtain high-quality products with practical value, resulting in For a long time, human society failed to realize the importance of penicillin.
Ten years later, through unremitting efforts, many scientists finally found methods to separate and purify penicillin. However, these technologies were limited to laboratory applications and were far from the requirements for large-scale production.
It was not until 1941 that scientists not only discovered a method for efficiently cultivating penicillin, but also successfully used corn syrup as a culture medium, laying the foundation for the industrial production of penicillin.
Scientists at Oxford University invented the freeze-drying method to separate and purify penicillin in 1942. They used this technology to obtain high-quality penicillin crystals. This was a landmark technological breakthrough that removed the biggest obstacle to the clinical application of penicillin.
Utilizing existing process technology and with the full cooperation of scientists and entrepreneurs, large-scale production of penicillin was finally achieved in 1943.
Since its extensive use in clinical treatment, penicillin has not only saved hundreds of millions of lives in its seventy or eighty-year history, including war years and peacetime, but also provided a broad perspective and ideas for the subsequent development of new antibiotic drugs. .
The famous artemisinin has made mainland China the first winner of the Nobel Prize in Science (Physiology and Medicine). Professor Tu Youyou’s success lies in her discovery of ether extraction to separate and extract artemisinin from Artemisia annua. Craftsmanship.
Artemisia annua is a plant that is widely distributed naturally. Its efficacy has long been recorded in ancient Chinese medicine prescriptions, but modern medicine has higher requirements for its use.
Although everyone knows that the active ingredient of Artemisia annua is artemisinin, many attempts have been made to extract the active ingredient and make it convenient for clinical use. However, either the active ingredient is destroyed or high-purity crystals cannot be obtained. . Professor Tu took a different approach and started with solvent extraction and found that ether extraction was the most effective. The innovation of the extraction process has solved the problem that has troubled scientists for many years in one fell swoop.
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Eating grains will lead to all kinds of diseases. This is the objective reality faced by human beings. Common minor ailments such as colds and fevers can be cured by the body's own immune system. However, for some diseases, such as the great plagues that have appeared many times in history, without vaccines and effective drug treatments, mankind will fall into a situation of no return.
In the face of the new coronavirus that is raging around the world and is said to coexist with humans, effective therapeutic drugs will eventually be needed to get social life back on track. For some diseases, even if drugs cannot completely cure them, they can help humans alleviate their condition.
There is neither an elixir of immortality nor a cure-all for all diseases. Although medicines themselves also have the disadvantage of being "three parts poisonous", apart from air and water, as well as daily necessities such as food, clothing, housing and transportation, medicines are also ineffective for human beings. This is a fact that no one can deny.
It is the common wish of mankind to expect the emergence of drugs with higher efficacy, smaller side effects, or even no side effects.
Fang Hanmin is a top student of 985 University. Not only did he obtain a doctorate in pharmacy and pharmaceutical sciences from Oxford University, he also became the project director of the European RGP Company’s New Drug Creation Center after graduation. However, during a business trip, due to a plane crash, he time-traveled back from the 21st century. By the end of the 1970s, he was possessed by a temporary worker with the same name in the Red Star Pharmaceutical Factory.
As an overseas child, although he was in Europe, Fang Hanmin would have to return to his country sooner or later, but he did not expect to come back in this way.
Traveling through time was a one-way ticket, but when he realized the reality of the situation, Fang Hanmin felt relieved. He has a PhD in pharmaceutical sciences from Oxford University and is the project director of the New Drug Creation Center of RGP Company. Faced with the backward production technology of the Red Star Pharmaceutical Factory, he felt that he had something to offer here. Useful place...
