Studied under oncology, cancer is a life-threatening conglomerate of a disease that is affected by various factors like lifestyle, environment, pathogens and more. The prognosis for treatment and understanding the disease has evolved exponentially over the years, extending beyond a clinic. And one factor accounting to its improving research focus is chemical biology, which has some answers to some ground-breaking questions.
What is Chemical Biology?
The pills, injections, tonics, tablets and capsules prescribed for the patient at the doctor’s diagnosis, or even over the counter medicines, are all made of constituent molecules and formulas that serve to relieve you of the pain or progress your cure.
The study of those constituent molecules, the bonding and the chemistry of developing the best formula is what refers to chemical biology. They’re small in size and conveniently deliverable in packages, but the science and the skill to make them so small yet heavily impactful is the analysis that chemical biology tackles.
Chemical biology explores the designs and disciplines into which existing and new molecules can be arranged to maximize the nature of their action together. It characterizes and validates the formation that is further used to create a formula for the final medicine.
It is also the middle ground of three other branches of pharmacology: synthetic chemistry, basic biomedical research, and therapeutic science. Synthetic chemistry analyses the chemical bonding and molecular formation of newer molecules. The structural biology services provide functional facilities that help accelerate small-molecule drug discovery.
Basic biomedical research uses these molecules to understand the disease better, that helps therapeutic science to categorize and make them into mechanisms of action.
Effect of Chemical Biology in Cancer Research
These small and big molecules are constantly studied by researchers to understand the cellular formation of the disease and the processes that go astray in the cancer cells. This is better explained in context of the diseased cells developing an immunity to one or more of the existing cures or handlers of any cancer—if a therapy for one kind of cancer doesn’t show any improvement, then the cellular structure is examined.
This biology of the cells, and further the molecular structure at a very micro level, is tied to a particular protein that should be working in a predetermined way but isn’t—which is studied. The chemistry matters of the molecules matters because it is not only the structure, the chemicals in it that bind up certain molecules. That structure cannot be replicated at all times, and there the chemistry helps to build new molecules as chemical biology helps to do.
The protein binding, structural analysis and chemical modifications with additional input all work together to create a three-dimensional blueprint of the structure to understand prognosis at a very molecular level.
These replicas and structures are then subjected to various tests, are built and rebuilt to rust the target protein away. They’re tested using voluntary, healthy donor’s cells and the ones derived from the patients to understand the effects under many circumstances.
Ground-breaking Developments
A noteworthy example of a success of this research is imatinib that targeted tyrosine kinases and helped draw the connection on oncogene addiction in drug discovery of anticancer drugs. Chemical biology has led to the rise of chemical probes in cancer biology, a significant discovery that has shown face in numerous medical reports since 2010.
One key goal that chemical biology has achieved is to understand target identification, or the primary centre from where the compounds of disease emerge from and circulate with connections in the body. Due to breaking down and repeating the structures, scientists are able to create a map of compound activities and targets.