Chemistry and pharmacy in tomorrow's medicine

“With ethnopharmacy, I am a bit of an exotic at ETH,” Barbara Frei Haller jokes. This field is about the traditional use and management of medicines in various cultures (e.g. Chinese medicine), especially with regard to medicinal plants and natural products. But it is a mistake to think that this has nothing to do with modern treatment methods. Indeed, modern western medicine has evolved from natural medicine. "Our drugs still contain interesting natural substances, in pure or chemically modified form," Frei Haller emphasizes. For her, medicine of tomorrow therefore also implicates more cooperation and exchange between traditional medicine and western medicine, especially since natural products in particular still hold great potential. Frei Haller recently demonstrated a little of this potential in external page her children’s lecture at Science City (german), showing the kids how medicinal plants can be helpful when struggling, e.g., with minor ailments.

Stefanie Krämer is interested in how drugs behave in our body (in concrete terms absorption, distribution, metabolism and excretion of substances). "Substances take different routes in the body, can be chemically inactivated or activated and leave it via the kidneys or intestines, for example. But if two drugs have the same pathway, they can interfere with each other," Krämer explains. Such findings are important, e.g., for assessing side effects, which can in addition depend on a person's age, genes or even eating habits, as Krämer will explain in more detail external page her Science City lecture (recording in german) this weekend. This also applies to plant remedies. Today, however, good predictions can already be made during the drug development process, in fact directly out of the test tube. This can minimize the risk of side effects. In the future, there should be further improvements in the field, also regarding more individualized treatment options.

Renato Zenobi's research in the field of mass spectrometry (MS) also bring us a step closer towards a more individualized medicine. With "soft" ionization methods, it is already possible to observe entire complexes of enzymes and drugs. Even metabolites that leave the body via the lungs can be measured by MS, as Zenobi will demonstrate at Science City external page via video clip (german). In principle, it is not new to use breath as an "indicator" for diseases – traditional Chinese medicine already exploits this, and dogs are able to "sniff out" various illnesses. In this case, of course, a chemical evaluation is difficult. Zenobi's method, however, allows concrete "live" measurements. This holds great potential for diagnostics: "It can be used, for example, to determine how quickly a drug is metabolized in the body and allows the dose to be individually adjusted for the patient," Zenobi says. Within the “Zurich Exhalomics” network, studies are even underway with lung cancer and corona patients. Apart from that, doping substances would be interesting, but many are unfortunately less suitable for breath analysis, "their metabolites end up in the urine too quickly."