The uncertainty principle in biology and medicine

Drugs based on biomacromolecules have emerged in recent decades. The macromolecules differ from small molecules in their effect on the body. Cytokines, including interferons and chemokines, as well as enzymes, glucans, and antibodies, have been established to have multiple binding sites on the same macromolecule with appropriate complementary structures in biological systems. The properties of cytokine pleiotropy and redundancy, which are determined by the nature of cytokine networks, determine different functional effects, i.e. cytokines can have more than one effect on the same cell. The same pattern has been found when studying the effects of interferons. There is ample evidence that the presence of several protein allosteric sites motivates the design of allosteric modulators of protein activity with their potentially higher specificity and lower toxicity than conventional orthosteric compounds. That is to say that any macromolecule has a potential probabilistic set of mechanisms of action. The use of macromolecules as drugs can trigger one or another specific mechanism of their action from the many potentially existing ones. Because of this, high-molecular-weight drugs, unlike low-molecular-weight pharmaceutical compounds, should have apparently their own characteristics when passing through regulatory organs.

macromolecules, cytokine, immune response, mechanism of action