The advances in medical science have made the treatment of disease increasingly better over the last decades, and the pace of new ideas seems to be accelerating. While there are still many debilitating diseases for which there has been no definitive cure, many can be treated much more effectively. The increasing number of tools at physicians disposal are remarkable, including antibody conjugation.
Modern medicine has steadily increased the pool of information and the repertoire of treatment options, yet it has become less accessible to the average person. Cost is a limiting factor, but the real crisis is that patients do not understand the treatments. The use of a vaccine or an antibiotic is comprehensible, but medicine has become more complex than that.
But as the underlying reasons for infirmity were further unveiled, the methods used to arrest their progress or even eliminate the disease mechanism became clearer to physicians, yet more difficult for the patient to understand. Compounds used to treat illnesses became more specific, and there seems no end to new products available to remedy sickness.
When it came to many serious illnesses, especially cancers, the treatments the lay person was aware of was largely one of two methods. The victim could be given chemotherapy or radiation therapy, or both. While the exact means of conducting these treatments were complicated, the basic idea was not hard to understand for either the patient or the care giving family.
The problem is that not all cancers are the same, not all were as susceptible to treatment and the treatment itself was devastatingly hard on the patient. In some cases people did not survive the treatment, as it weakened their bodies and immune systems, yet there was no real alternative. Innovations in medicine are changing that situation, and many more cancer patients are surviving.
The understanding of how to get chemicals to the cancer cells has increased dramatically, with the chemical and physical layouts of the cells revealed. The challenge for the researchers then is to find unique surface characteristics that they can then exploit to deliver drugs that will kill the cell. Creating a type of designer molecule that uniquely fits the surface of the target cell ensures a great specificity for the drug.
Chemically mixing what is essentially the active ingredient with proteins that can be modified help create a product which can physically bind only with its intended destination cell. This means that the lethal effect of the medicine is restricted to just the disease causing cells, which are then killed and removed by the body. The side effects of such specified treatments are virtually nonexistent.
By creating a combination that allows the chemicals to attach to the right molecules and in a specific place allows for laser-like specificity. Like a smart bomb, the medicine is then applied exactly where it is needed. The introduction of <A href="http://www.
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