The drug was born an orphan. Although he had parents, they died in an another research article and got separated from him way sooner. Let us call this orphan Simba. Simba was born under extremely tight circumstances at 12:45 am in an organic chemistry laboratory. He knew the minute he was born, he wasn’t meant for this world. But, the scientists thought otherwise. On the contrary, they tried very hard to make him a ‘perfect fit’.
Simba was a strong molecule in an imperfect system of biological molecules. Only a few days to his birth, he found out that he has bunch of 4 brothers and 2 sisters. In all, they were the ‘Secret seven’ of the lab. Everyday, they would take out little Simba and his siblings from their vials, and test on various disease models. The general procedure involves Simba being diluted in water at various ratios to get the best efficacy against the bigger evil, which ranged from cancer to malaria.
Simba never liked the taste of the malarial parasite and the scientists sensed that soon enough. He was shifted to the cancer ward. His siblings remained in the malaria ward due their indecisive nature. Simba loved playing with the cancer cells. But, he was not the same everyday. Sometimes he would kick cell in the mitochondria, sometimes constantly tap the surface and put the cells under stress and sometimes, he would decide to sleep in the cell media. Life was happening for him that way. In contrast, the scientist’s life was hell risen.
Being the only candidate in cancer clinical studies, it had become crucial for the scientists to make Simba perform. They had to turn heads to the computational chemist of the lab. He simply took the chemical structure of Simba and computationally docked him to different active pockets in the cancer causing proteins. Within no time, he found love in Simba’s structure and style of docking. Although notorious, Simba docked in the strongest arm of the desired protein in a week’s time. He hung in there with such high affinity scoring that the scientists were stupified. The scientists rushed to the lab, and dosed the cancer cells with extra protein boosters. Then, they took the real Simba out and left him with this new environment. Simba loved the taste of the new cells. He commenced to consistently kill the evil and within a month’s time became the King of the lab.
Research papers showered love on him and but, the reviewers didn’t. They could sense this unwanted change in smell of the cells. The re-experimenting began, but Simba has grown wary of this taste too and stopped reacting. The questions never ended and soon, Simba was permanently stored in his vial while a Simba junior was born.
Simba was a smart kid, but he wasn’t ‘druggable’ enough. He died away like his parents and his grandparents and his millions of billion dollar family of drugs, while the lesser evil resisted.
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