In a new drug Usually start with a tragedy.

Peter Ray knows it. Born in what Zimbabwe, the child of a mechanic and a technician in radiology, Ray Flex with his family in South Africa during the Zimbabwean War. He remembers the trip in 1980 in a convoy of armored cars. While the sun flambed, a soldier taught at Ray, 8, how to shoot a machine gun. But his human kept stopping. She didn’t feel well.

Cape Town doctors diagnosed him with cancer. Ray remembers having taken his radiotherapy treatments with her, hospital rooms, colostomy bags. She loved the beach, liked walking along the line where the water encountered the terrain. But it becomes more difficult for her to leave. Sometimes she returned from the hospital for a while and she sheds as if things were improving. Ray obtained his hopes. Then things would collapse again. Surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy – Treatments that were on the table in the 80s – Wine soon exhausted. While she was dying, he promised her that he was going to do another, in one way or another. He was 13 years old.

Ray studied to become with the medicinal chemist, first in South Africa, contracting loans to finance his studies, then at the University of Liverpool. It global in pharmaceutical society across the United Kingdom, on digital projects. Now, at 53, he is one of the main drug designers in a pharmaceutical company called RECORursion. He thinks of this promised his mother in Lot. “He lived with me all my life”, Heys. “I need to get medication on the market that have an impact on cancer.”

The desire to prevent your own tragedies from performing in Somomeone, other can be a strong motivator. But the drug discovery process has always been creaky, slow guest. First, chemists like Ray Zero in their target – Matel A protein, a long chain of adine acids glued and fell back on himself. They call a model on the screen of their computer and watch it transform into a black emptiness. They note the curves and the slopes on its surface, the places where molecule, navigating in darkness as a spacecraft, could dock. Then atom by Atom, they try to build the spaceship.

When the new molecule is ready, the chemists transmit it to biologists, who test it on living cells in hot rooms. No more tragedy: many cells die, for sides that are not always clear. The biology is complex and the new drug does not work as expected. Chemists will have to create another, and another, refining, adapting, often for years. A biologist, Keith Mikule of Insol Medicine, told me about his experience in another pharmaceutical company. After five years of work, their best molecule had unforeseen and dangerous side effects which meant that they did not become further. “There was a large team of chemists, a large team of biologists, thousands of manufactured molecules and no real progress,” he said.

If a team is very lucky, it gets a molecule which, in mice, does what it is supposed to do. They are fortunate to give a small group of healthy human volunteers, in line the trials. If the volunteers remain healthy, they give it to more people, including those in question, in a phase II. If the patients do not become more sick, they have the opportunity – phase III – to give it to more sick people, as much as they can find, different as possible in groups.

At the Eaach stadium, for reasons that few people underline and less can foresee, large drug rafts abandon. More than 90% of hopes fail along the way. When you meet drug hunters, you could ask them, with tenderly and tenderly, if they have already had a drug. “It’s very rare,” said Mikule, Whho has a medication (Niraparib, for ovary cancer) in his name. “We are unicorns.”