Question: With finding a new cure, could the current drugs be used as a base that can be built up on or does it need to start from scratch?

Zahra Massoud answered on 23 May 2022:

Yes! You’re absolutely right – a lot of the drugs we study now are based on already known drugs and chemicals. Sometimes we can find new purposes for drugs that are already out there and used for other things – like my project, where I take drugs that are normally antibiotics but seem to also have anti-cancer effects. Other times, we can use chemistry to “take apart” drugs we already have, and add the chemical groups onto different molecules to see if that makes the drug better or worse. This is a big part of medical chemistry, and lots of people work on doing this. Sometimes we also start from scratch, but this is a bit harder since we can’t always predict what a brand new drug might do.