[PinCushonQueen]

Can someone tell me what features of a drug molecule are likely to make the drug addictive?
Is it anything to do with branching methly groups?

Thanks!

*PCQ*

[Yggdrasil]

From a chemical point of view, there really isn't any way (at least that I know of) to predict whether a certain compound will be addictive or not based solely on the chemical structure.  I think the addictiveness of drugs relates more to the biology of the drugs, that is, which receptors they agonize/antagonize and how those receptors function in the brain.

[movies]

Pharma companies have pumped loads of cash into ways to probe biological activity without actually making/administering drugs.  If you know what the drug receptor site looks like, you can sometimes use a computer to model the structure of drug candidates in the binding site to get better activity, but you won't know all the biological effects until you really try it out.

The problem is that there are tons of binding sites on tons of different proteins and you just can't model them all, not to mention that we don't know the structure of many of them to begin with.

[PinCushonQueen]

Thanks for your help but this is still a confusing subject...
I know that aspirin isn't an addictive drug but I have no idea how to go about proving that from it's chemical structure... I have compared it to amphetamine and wondered if aspirin was not addictive because it didn't have the branching methyl group that the amphetamine structure has but other non-addictive drugs have a branching methly group so that kind of blows my idea out of the water!! Is it possible to prove from a molecular structure that a drug will act on the central nervous system?

Sorry for sounding a bit dense!!

Thanks!

[movies]

I would say no.

Most every molecules are active on the body if you get it in high enough concentration though.

You can sometimes predict that molecules with very similar structures will have similar effects, but this is not general.  There are a lot of differences between aspirin and methamphetamine, so trying to attribute that to a branching alkyl is definitely a stretch.

[Custos]

Thanks for your help but this is still a confusing subject...
I know that aspirin isn't an addictive drug but I have no idea how to go about proving that from it's chemical structure... I have compared it to amphetamine and wondered if aspirin was not addictive because it didn't have the branching methyl group that the amphetamine structure has but other non-addictive drugs have a branching methly group so that kind of blows my idea out of the water!! Is it possible to prove from a molecular structure that a drug will act on the central nervous system?

There is no simple algorithm that relates chemical structure to biological activity (including addictiveness). There definitely are some known trends - we know that Michael acceptors and alkylating agents, for example, may cause cancer because they can alkylate DNA. But the biology of addiction is far too complex to draw any simple conclusion that equates molecular structure to addiction.

How I wish otherwise - it would make drug (therapeutic) discovery so much easier.