Chemical Production

Question 1

What are the 2 ways to manufacture drugs?

Answer 1

BATCH production

• several drugs made using same equipment
• low costs (same equipment)(saves money)

CONTINUOUS production

• never stops
• runs automatically
• quality of product is consistent

Question 2

What are the disadvantages of batch production?

Answer 2

Labour-intensive -
Equipment needs to be controlled and cleaned every time to make a new type of medicine

(Remember they use the same equipment for every medicine, therefore needs to be cleaned)

-can be tricky to keep the same quality from batch to batch

Question 3

What is a disadvantage for pharmaceutical drugs?

Answer 3

Expensive

Time consuming

Question 4

What do you do in research and development for pharmaceutical drugs?

Answer 4

Finding the suitable compound

Testing it

Modifying it

Testing again

Until it’s ready

Question 5

What do you do in trialling for pharmaceutical drugs?

Answer 5

Test the drugs on animals and even humans

To prove that the drug works and is safe (legal requirements)

Question 6

What do you do in manufacturing for pharmaceutical drugs?

Answer 6

Drugs cannot be automated in pharmaceutical drugs (batch production)

Raw materials are often rare, therefore needs to be extracted from plants

(The process is manufacturing)

Question 7

How do you extract raw materials for plants in pharmaceutical drugging?

Answer 7

Plant needs to be

Crushed
Boiled
Dissolve in a solvent

Extract substance by chromatography

• different chemicals will appear on the paper
• cut out the chemical you will need and dissolve it off the paper

Question 8

How to know that the substances you have extracted from the plant is pure using the technique chromatography?

Answer 8

Pure substances won’t be separated by chromatography - be one blob

Pure substances will have a specific melting point and boiling point.
If substance is impure, it might melt of froze unlike the pure substance which will be recognised as nothing happened to it.