Therapeutics Flashcards
What is therapeutics?
Therapeutics is the science that underlies the treatment of disease, encompassing therapies directed at:
- Prevention
- Treatment
What sort of thepeurtic options are there? - just list them
Meds Surgery Radiotherapy Talking therapies Alternative therapies Advanced therapies
Why is it difficult to ensure adequate prescribing?
Due to the sheet number of conditions that exist and the number of options available
List the 5 stages of drug discovery and development?
Research Discovery Preclinical development Clinical development Approval and launch
What does the following mean?
Pharmacokinetics
Pharmacodynamics
Pharmacokinetics
What the body does to a drug
Absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion (ADME)
Pharmacodynamics
What the drug does to the body
How it works
What are some challenges of clinical trials? - list some
External validity - Volunteers don’t represent the populations receiving the drug
Large sample size often needed
Inflexibility
Ignores individual responses (precision medicine and subgroup analysis)
Research regulation and governance
Operational complexity and EXPENSIVE
Why is licensing process needed during drug development?
Ensure quality, safety and efficacy and that the benefits of a medicine outweigh the risks
Promote public health in relation to medicines
Why do adverse drug reactions present a challenge? - 5
Adversely affect patient concordance
Reduce available choice of drug treatment
Reduce potential efficacy of drug treatment
Reduce quality of life
Cause diagnostic confusion
Adverse drug reactions CLASSIFICATION 1:
What does Type A (Augmented) mean?
What does Type B (Bizarre) mean?
Dose related
Predictable
Usually common but not severe
Not dose related
Unpredictable
May be very severe or fatal
Adverse drug reactions CLASSIFICATION 2:
Give an example of each of the following?
Type C (‘Chronic treatment effects’
Type D (‘Delayed effects’)
Type E (‘End-of treatment effects’)
Type C (‘Chronic treatment effects’) e.g. osteoporosis with steroids
Type D (‘Delayed effects’) e.g. drug-induced cancers
Type E (‘End-of treatment effects’) withdrawal syndromes
What is Pharmacovigilance?
Pharmacovigilance also known as drug safety, is the pharmacological science relating to the collection, detection, assessment, monitoring, and prevention of adverse effects with pharmaceutical products.
The following are ways that drug safety is monitored.
What do they mean?
Spontaneous reporting - what system is used?
Prescription event monitoring?
Data linkage?
Yellow card system
Prescription-Event Monitoring (PEM) is a well established postmarketing surveillance technique designed to monitor the overall safety of newly marketed medicines as used in real-life clinical practice, usually in cohorts of at least 10000 patients.
Data linkage (Modern computerised patient records offer a substantial opportunity for drug safety monitoring in very large real world populations)
What does QALY stand for?
Quality Adjusted Life Years
Future prospects:
What does Pharmacogenomics mean?
Biomarkers can also be used. What can this be useful in?
Pharmacogenomics is the study of how genes affect a person’s response to drugs. This relatively new field combines pharmacology (the science of drugs) and genomics (the study of genes and their functions) to develop effective, safe medications and doses that will be tailored to a person’s genetic makeup.
Cancer Rx
Gene therapy
Cell therapy
Tissue engineering
Advanced therapies:
What does gene therapy mean?
What does cell therapy?
What
Gene therapy is an experimental technique that uses genes to treat or prevent disease. In the future, this technique may allow doctors to treat a disorder by inserting a gene into a patient’s cells instead of using drugs or surgery.
Cell therapy (also called cellular therapy, cell transplantation, or cytotherapy) is a therapy in which viable cells are injected, grafted or implanted into a patient in order to effectuate a medicinal effect, for example, by transplanting T-cells capable of fighting cancer cells
