Sweet Medicine

Cover story of the new July 2002 Scientific American is about "Sweet Medicine, Building better drugs from sugars," with an illustration of stacks of sugar cube building blocks to form the letters Rx. Inside are truly gorgeous pictures of the inner workings of the cell with remarks such as "Sugars decorate many proteins and lipids." Pharmaceutical companies planning to get on the sugar bandwagon by developing synthetic (toxic) versions of the active sugars, which can then be registered as drugs.

Scientific American then goes on to say that "scientists of the past did not neglect sugars from lack of interest", but the "problems stemmed in large part from the extraordinary structural variability of sugars." And further the "alphabet" with the "simplest sugars in the body can theoretically assemble into more than 15million four component structures".

Glycoscience is advancing rapidly.