WHATEVER ails you, if you have to take two pills a day for it instead of one, you can blame metabolic clearance. Before they can get busy, drug molecules must run a biochemical gauntlet as the body’s machinery tries to break them down. As a result, much of what is in a pill may be excreted in useless pieces before it has had a chance to work its wonders.
Last month, though, America’s pharmaceutical regulator, the Food and Drug Administration, received a request to approve a drug, currently called SD-809, that could change this. SD-809 is intended to treat the palsy caused by Huntington’s chorea—a rare and terrible genetic illness. If approved, it will open the gates for a new type of drug that, thanks to a few well-placed atoms of a variant of hydrogen called deuterium, is able to evade metabolic clearance, and thus remain active longer.
An atom’s chemical properties are determined by its electrons, which interact with those of other atoms. Those electrons are equal in number to the protons in an atom’s nucleus (electrons are negative and protons positive, so the atom’s overall charge is zero), and this number in turn defines an atom’...
from The Economist: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1PNytdh
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