B-lymphocyte or T-lymphocyte in blood with red blood cells
Monoclonal antibodies, small interfering RNA, nonsteroidal androgen receptors, small molecule inhibitors, and allosteric modulators comprise the list.
By David Warmflash, M.D.
In the 1920s, pharmaceutical science was just emerging and medical researchers were just starting to understand how the study of biochemistry, physiology, and hormones could combine to produce insight enough to accelerate drug discovery. This was the era of the discovery of insulin, both its production by the pancreas and its game-changing capability as an exogenous agent to treat diabetes mellitus. It was the era of the discovery of vitamin C, vitamin D, vitamin E, and vitamin K, their functions, and the consequences of their deficiencies. The end of the 1920s introduced the beginning of research on antimicrobial agents that would lead to the wide use of sulfa drugs and penicillin over the next two decades. Meanwhile, new techniques, such as radioisotope labeling, ultracentrifugation, mass spectrometry, and improved X-ray crystallography were gearing up to enable very deliberate drug development, driven by the need to intervene with particular biochemical reactions, rather than to isolate agents that just happened to do something useful to human medicine.