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A team of researchers at Cardiff University has developed a new method to test the likelihood of a drug turning into a potentially harmful version of itself when it enters the body.
The team has been working in collaboration with Liverpool John Moores University and AstraZeneca. The tool thus developed assess the likely risk of a drug undergoing racemisation - a process in which a drug flips into a mirror image of itself and becomes either inert or potentially dangerous.
The team had set up experiments in which they simulated the chemical conditions of the human body and introduced a number of drugs to the system, monitoring the rate at which the different drugs underwent racemisation.
The researchers believe that this risk-assessment will make it possible to manufacture safer medication by helping the pharmaceutical industry to quickly spot medication that will fail during development and focus their efforts on compounds that are more likely to work.
