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Drug Targeting
Name: Rekha
Status: other
Grade: other
Location: Outside U.S.
Country: Taiwan
Date: Fall 2012
Question:
How tablets cures our diseases? For example, we are taking medicines for head ache. how drugs goes to specific site to cure head ache? Is some amount of drug goes to else where (any other part of the body)?
Replies:
Tablets are just one form of a chemical substance used to deliver an active ingredient into the body. Liquid solutions, powders, and less commonly vapors are also delivery systems. It is not the tablet, or other delivery system, that acts as the medicine, but the chemical substance that are contained in the delivery system. The active ingredient is absorbed into the body through a number of pathways – the stomach, the intestines, nasal passages to mention just a few. Depending upon the chemical structure of the active ingredient the absorption may be very general (ethanol is an example of one chemical that is rapidly and pretty uniformly absorbed by the body even through the skin or even the mouth), or may be very specific. One of the factors that must be taken into account in formulating a drug delivery system is how general and how fast the active ingredient is distributed by various organs and tissues.
Pharmacologists must determine how the active ingredient is absorbed. This is often not an easy task, because what enters the body may undergo chemical reactions before finding the point of drug activity. And it is often the case that the pathway the active ingredient takes may depend on the form of the delivery system. What may be mode of delivery of a tablet and a hypodermic needle can be quite different.
But addressing your question directly, it is not the tablet itself that performs the function, but the chemical contained in the tablet.
Vince Calder
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Update: November 2011
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