Instructor: Dennis Drayna
Thursdays, October 17 to November 7, 3:00 – 5:00 PM, East Rec
4-week session. Cost: $65
Course Description:
This course, designed for lay audiences, teaches how drugs are discovered and turned into useful medicines.
Course Detail:
Why is it so difficult to develop medicines to treat disease? When faced with a deadly disease, how do scientists systematically hunt for a potential cure? And, once a potential drug is discovered, how does it turn into a useful medicine that can be administered to people? In this course, students will learn about pharmaceuticals, with a focus on discovery and development, plus an introduction to clinical trials and regulatory approval. The course will explain, in simple, user-friendly terms, how scientists make pharmaceutical discoveries, and how these discoveries ultimately become new drugs. The course will also cover some of the ongoing efforts to develop new treatments for major diseases, and will have a section devoted to some of the newest and most exciting approaches for treating disease, including gene therapy, gene editing, stem cells, brain implants, and precision medicine.
Week One:
- Introduction, overview, and definition/explanation of common terms
- Classic examples across the history of pharmaceuticals:
- Aspirin
- Penicillin
- Statins
- Historic role of serendipity in drug discovery
- Effects of drug development on the human population through time
Week Two:
- Historic role of serendipity in drug discovery
- Discovery – Differentiation of drugs vs. biologics
- Drugs:
- Assay development – search for the right target
- Natural products
- Chemistry
- New Chemical Entities (NCE’s), First in class, “Blockbusters”
- Biologics:
- Introduction to proteins
- Classic examples – Insulin, Vaccines, Factor VIII
- Genetic engineering and the rise of biologic therapies
- Growth hormone to Ozempic
- Antibody-based drugs
- Herceptin, other important examples
Week Three:
- Development
- The “Great Funnel” in therapeutic development
- Safety AND Efficacy
- Toxicology
- Absorption, Distribution, Metabolism, and Excretion (ADME)
- Animal testing
- The Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
- Clinical Trials – the concept of the “Valley of Death”
- Phase I – Phase IV trials
- Patents, marketing, and the economics of the pharmaceutical industry
Week Four:
- State of the art in current drug development
- Cancer, Alzheimers, Antibiotics
- New approaches to treating disease
- Precision medicine and “theranostics”
- Gene therapy
- CRISPR and other gene editing technologies
- Stem cells
- Brain implants – Neuralink
Instructor Biography:
Dennis Drayna received his bachelor’s degree in Genetics from the University of Wisconsin in 1976 and his PhD, also in Genetics, from Harvard University in 1981. Following a postdoctoral fellowship in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of Utah, he joined the Department of Molecular Biology at Genentech, Inc. in 1985, where he worked on the genetics of cholesterol and lipid metabolism. In 1996, he moved to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, where he did work on the genetics of hearing, speech disorders, and the senses on taste and smell. He holds 19 U.S. patents, and is the author of 110 published scientific papers, and he has worked extensively with the pharmaceutical industry in the U.S., Japan, and Europe. He has lived in Oakmont since 2019.
