Properties of Medicine and Its Major Classification

4th Quarter
Drug – as any chemical that brings about a change in biologic function through its chemical actions.
TWO TYPES OF DRUGS
Agonist – is a substance that acts as an activator, or promotes activity of a specific regulatory system
or body process.
Antagonist – is a substance that acts as an inhibitor, having the opposite effect to the agonist.
But wait, what do these drugs act on?
Drugs act on a regulator molecule, known as a receptor, which literally receives the agonist or
antagonist molecule, and sends the signal to the body system it regulates, changing it to the liking
of the agonist (activate) or antagonist (inhibit).
P – proteins, E – enzymes, N – nucleic
Thus, drugs that are artificially delivered to patients must have the following characteristics in order
to be an effective pharmacological drug:
1. The drug must have a very specific size, shape, atomic configuration and electrical charge to be
able to interact with the receptor.
2. A drug must have the necessary properties to travel to its site of action or receptor from its site
of administration.
3. It must be easily inactivated or excreted from the body once it has been used for its purpose.
These drugs can either be synthesized
within the body, in which case they are
called hormones, or chemically
synthesized outside the body.
Of these drugs, poisons are drugs with
harmful effects; HOWEVER, any drug or
hormone in extremely high amounts can
have harmful effects and thus, function as
a poison. Of these poisons, toxins are
poisons that are biologically synthesized.
Characteristics of Drugs:
Physical and Chemical Nature of Drugs
Any drug given to the body can either be a solid (eg. aspirin), liquid (eg. ethanol) or gas (nitrous
oxide). What is the importance of this physical nature? The physical nature of the drug determines
how the drug is administered to the body.
Drug Size
The drug size must high enough to be unique to a receptor (this determines the lower limit of drug
size, 100 Molecular Weight (MW) – a drug ideally should not be lower than this), All drugs must be
able to carry out diffusion to move to the compartments in which they are needed. If the drug size
is too large, then there is no way for the drug to diffuse into compartments, and the ability to diffuse
decreases. Small drugs are able to fit through the small pores and into compartments where they
can be used. Larger drugs just can’t fit.
Three base units are commonly used for metric measurement of medications to indicate weight (or
mass), volume, and length: gram (g), liter (L), and meter (m)
Drug Reactivity and Drug Bonds
Drug-receptor bonds are of 3 major types:
▪ Covalent
Covalent bonds, as you know, are very strong bonds that are not readily broken. An example
of a drug that uses a covalent mechanism of action is aspirin, which forms a covalent bond with its
target enzyme, cyclooxygenase.
Aspirin works in two ways: An anti-inflammatory drug for pain relief and anti-inflammation,
by preventing production of the cyclooxygenase produced substance, prostaglandins.
▪ Electrostatic
▪ This is a much more common type of bond in drug-receptor interactions, and is weaker than
the covalent bonds.
▪ They can either be:
▪ Relatively strong ionic linkages between permanently charged molecules (eg.
electrostatic interaction between Na+ and Cl-).
▪ Weaker hydrogen bonds that occur in highly polar molecules.
▪ Very weak induced dipole interactions such as Van Der Waals forces.
▪ Hydrophobic
▪ These bonds are quite weak.
 ▪ Usually found in the interactions between highly lipid-soluble drugs and lipids in the cell
membranes.
The strength of the drug-receptor bond determines the specificity of the drug. Drugs that bond via
weak interactions usually are more specific, simply because only one particular type of receptor can
be able to bind it and thus induce its effect. Another side effect of using a weakly reactive drug is
that the drug cannot remain bound for very long, and thus has only short acting effects.
Thus, to summarize, if we wish to have a specific, short-acting effect, a drug with low
reactivity is ideal. If we wish to have a broad acting, powerful and long- lasting effect (think aspirin,
as discussed above), we use drugs with higher reactivity.
Classifications of medicines
• Prescription-Only Medicine (POM) – has to be prescribed by a doctor or other authorized
health professional and it has to be dispensed from a pharmacy or from another specifically
licensed place; Examples of prescription-only medicines include virtually all antibiotics and
medicines for treating high blood pressure.
• Pharmacy (P) – an intermediate level of control, can be bought only from pharmacies and
under a pharmacist’s supervision; examples of pharmacy medicines include tablets for
emergency contraception and medicines containing codeine for treating pain that is not
relieved by aspirin, ibuprofen or paracetamol alone.
• Over-the-counter medicines – ‘Over-the-counter (OTC) medicines’ covers all general sale
medicines and pharmacy medicines. The description conveniently distinguishes medicines
that can be bought from those that must be prescribed. General sale medicines are taken for
common, easily recognized ailments which usually last around 2–3 days. These medicines
cause few troublesome side effects in normal use. Examples of general sale medicines include
small packs of painkillers and of antihistamines for allergies.
• Therapeutic classification
This type of classification describes the clinical purpose, or the physiological change induced
by the drug, and does not describe anything about the way the drug achieves this change. A
large percentage of these categories begin with the prefix “anti”, because anti means
“against”, and these categories describe the condition that the drug is working against. There
are antipsychotics, antidepressants, anticonvulsants, antinauseants, and so forth. Some of
their functions are immediately apparent from the name, while others require a little more
background information. Of course, there are other classes that don’t begin with this prefix.
Decongestants, hallucinogens, sedatives, stimulants.
• Pharmacological classification
Describes the specific thing that the drug does on the molecular level in order to elicit the
desired physiological effect. Again, focusing on the heart and blood vessels, calcium channel
blockers quite literally block calcium channels in the heart, which are protein channels in the
membranes of cells that regulate the passage of calcium ions in and out of the cell.