ABSTRACT
From the dawn of civilization, the goal of medicine has been to increase longevity while simultaneously enhancing the quality of life. Tribal and tropical medications were the “aspirin” of medieval medicine. The first organized large-scale effort toward the prolongation of life was the use of vaccines to combat infectious diseases. Later, medical intervention included therapeutics derived from mammalian fluids (e.g., plasma-derived coagulation factors or immunoglobulins, hormones derived from human urine, bovinesourced heparin) and tissues (e.g., human growth hormone [hGH] from the pituitary gland of human cadavers, placenta-derived bovine products such as albumin and collagen). More recently, technologies such as bioinformatics and proteomics created by combining molecular biology techniques with robotics and computers have facilitated the discovery and design of a vast array of biologicals with prophylactic and therapeutic applications.
