Posted by Larry Hoover on May 11, 2008, at 20:05:48
In reply to Re: modafinil and armodafinil, how do they differ? » Larry Hoover, posted by cactus on May 10, 2008, at 22:08:30
> Thanks Lar, I just know what does and doesn't work for me. Right now it's modafinil. So thanks for explaining it to me. I'm not a very scientific minded person.
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> I do research all the meds I have taken, like patient info sheets, and as much data/research I can find online and comprehend, as to how it's working for me (or supposed to be), and then I get lost with the intimate chemistry details and make up structures pertaining to the dynamics/mechanics of it all.
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> Thanks again CI do appreciate the difficulty in grasping these concepts. If you'll permit me to expound a little more.....
If you consider nuts and bolts, or wood screws, as an example....by convention, we've adopted a universal system of thread pitch that tightens when turned clockwise, and loosens when turned anti-clockwise. The aphorism for that is "righty-tighty, lefty-loosy". It could have been the other way around, but we only have the one pattern. Mother nature is like that, too.
All common amino acids have a left-handed twist. We call them L-amino acids. If you come across a DL designation (e.g. D,L-phenylalanine, or DLPA), it means that they're synthetic. Mother nature uses enzymes that can only create L-molecules, but man uses cruder methods that make both in equal amounts. Using that wood screw analogy, it would be as if we made screws that tightened (or loosened) with either a left or a right twist. Grossly inefficient, wot? Moreover, if you came upon a wood screw in a wooden article, you'd have no way to determine which way to turn it to loosen it, as the threads are hidden from view. That sort of thing just wouldn't survive in Nature, and long ago, the L-twist became the only game in town.
Drugs that we make are also sensitive to the same "twist" issue, because only one of the twists matches up with the natural twist of the target tissue. The ones with the wrong twist sometimes just gum things up, even though we hope they're simply inactive.
I haven't studied the modafanil "twist" issue, but I'd not be too surprised to discover that there may be a good reason to separate the active form (in this case, armodafanil, or R-modafanil) from the S-modafanil. Whether that is worth a new patent.....<shrug> If nothing else, if modafanil goes off-patent, it will likely be available at much better pricing as a generic. It may or may not be worth paying a substantial premium to get the armodafanil.
Lar
poster:Larry Hoover
thread:828224
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20080510/msgs/828584.html