Clinical pharmacology through the looking glass: reflections on the racemate vs enantiomer debate.

Abstract

In conclusion, clinical pharmacologists have devoted much attention to drug chirality over the fast few years. However, its importance as a contributory factor to variability in human drug response has not yet been established fully and has probably been overstressed. For many racemic drugs, the available evidence indicates that the therapeutically inactive enantiomer is not harmful and that the patient would gain no benefit from receiving the pure active enantiomer. On the other hand, there are a number of examples where a pure enantiomer has clear and significant advantages over its racemate or its other isomer