When we see the package insert, just like to get the “identity card” of the drugs, so the first we should focus on is the name, including generic name, trade name and chemical name. Actually, this is easy to understand, people also have a formal name , nickname, pseudonym, etc. Then, it’s the picture of drugs—drug structural formula. The formula is extremely important because it can decide all intrinsic properties of the drug. If the structural formula is different then it just like the photo has been changed–“identity” is not the person.

Secondly, drugs also have ID number—[Approval No.], which is unique. It’s available on the website of Food and Drug Administration. We can make fake complaints on those drugs without approval number or the symbol does not match.

Then, generic name is necessary and all the drug manufacturers must use it. That is to say, drugs on the market with a same generic name can come from multiple manufacturers. For example, in terms of Azithromycin tablets, there are 96 manufacturers and 126 manufacturers for injectable Azithromycin tablets, but the trade name is different. During the life, we usually buy a prescription only under the trade name, which might be likely to cause repeated drug use. Thus, it’s necessary to require a careful comparison of the chemical name and formula of drugs. Drugs with the same chemical name and structure decide medicines have the same drug efficiency, pharmacological and toxicological effects.

Why do so many similar drugs have similar generic name? Antibacterial agents could be a good example, such as cephalosporins: cefazolin, cefuroxime, cefotaxime, ceftriaxone, cephalosporins cefepime and lorraine, buserelin acetate, etc. With careful comparison of structure, it’s clear that they have a substantially identical structure, differing only in branches. Therefore, it’s necessary to pay attention to the drugs with common ancestry and family, to avoid side effects and increased drug resistance. In brief, learning the “identity” of drugs can give us a lot of helpful reminders and alerts.

But what is vaccine? Generally, as for its scientific definition, it is a biological product against a specific disease, which obtains immunity mainly from active prevention, making it possible to reduce the incidence of pathogenic ingredients. Clearly, since a long time, a variety of experienced researchers have conducted mass studies about vaccines and they have made great progresses. Modern vaccines have developed rapidly, successfully eradicating a number of dreaded epidemic diseases.

There are several classifications about different types of vaccines. Based on a management perspective, current vaccines can be generally divided into two types: type 1 and type 2. While as for perspective of the use, they can be classified as preventive vaccine and therapeutic vaccine; the latter’s mechanism is not entirely clear, meaning such research in the international community is still in the early stage of exploration. In terms of modern marketing vaccines, from the functional point of view, vaccines can be divided into bacterial vaccine, viral vaccine, toxoid vaccine, subunit (component) vaccine, polysaccharide conjugate vaccine and combination vaccine. For a technical point of production, vaccines are divided into attenuated vaccine, inactivated vaccine, recombinant vaccine, synthetic peptide vaccine and the like. All of these vaccines have played an important role in modern new drug design.

Vaccines have high prevention efficiency and safety, enabling them a cost-effective tool for public health systems. Vaccination is the most basic preventive medicine and its promotion is also the most convenient, but the wide range of applications and better security cannot be ensured merely because of its low cost. Media also choose to ignore the issue as well. In fact, vaccines generally present minor side effects, such as fever emergence and localized swelling. For now, with the advances in biotech, combination vaccines might be the overall trend for the entire vaccine industry, though such vaccines still require different separation and purification.

In fact, most people are still relatively strange to polypeptide drugs. Polypeptide is made of a special peptide chain that contains less than one hundred amino acids, which is generally regarded as a kind of relatively small protein. It has many advantages like less side effects and quicker absorption. Currently, the research and development of global polypeptide drugs have been widely involved in massive realms, such as vaccines, anticancer drugs, cardiovascular drugs, anti-viral polypeptides, as well as antimicrobial peptides and diagnostic kits. Due to the fact that current general antibiotic resistance is growing, new polypeptide antibiotics are in strong demand.

Given the advance of polypeptide drugs, a large number of listed companies compete for a larger global market, try to promote their own polypeptide drugs. To be more specific, polypeptide drugs have also been used in the research of Alzheimer’s peptide vaccine. And there are many related projects to support the research. Even if future pharmaceutical market for this unique disease is huge ( I mean such drugs are potential), the difficulty during the development process should not be ignored. Almost all the researchers agree with the idea. Taking the experimental model as an example, it’s hard to find a proper model for the experiment. Because different types of models might be needed while it’s difficult to feed these animals. As for the small mice, specifications, quantity, and use of evaluation methods have high demands.

However, scientists haven’t found the most ideal model for animal tests’ polypeptide drugs. All the animal experiments are carried in the exploration. Briefly speaking, polypeptide drugs have played an important role in human health, so they should be payed enough concerns.