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Concept
Efficacy
Summary
Efficacy is the ability to perform a task to a satisfactory or expected degree. The word comes from the same roots as effectiveness, and it has often been used synonymously, although in pharmacology a distinction is now often made between efficacy and effectiveness.
The word efficacy is used in pharmacology and medicine to refer both to the maximum response achievable from a pharmaceutical drug in research settings, and to the capacity for sufficient therapeutic effect or beneficial change in clinical settings.
Intrinsic activity
In pharmacology, efficacy (Emax) is the maximum response achievable from an applied or dosed agent, for instance, a small molecule drug. Intrinsic activity is a relative term for a drug's efficacy relative to a drug with the highest observed efficacy. It is a purely descriptive term that has little or no mechanistic interpretation.
In order for a drug to have an effect, it needs to bind to its target, and then to affect the function of this target. The target of a drug is commonly referred to as a receptor, but can in general be any chemically sensitive site on any molecule found in the body. The nature of such binding can be quantified by characterising how tightly these molecules, the drug and its receptor, interact: this is known as the affinity. Efficacy, on the other hand, is a measure of the action of a drug once binding has occurred. The maximum response, Emax, will be reduced if efficacy is sufficiently low.
The definition of efficacy has been object for discussion. The only way in which absolute measures of efficacy have been obtained is by single ion channel analysis of ligand gated ion channels. It is still not possible to do this for G protein-linked receptors.
In the case of the glycine receptor and the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (muscle type), it has been proposed by Sivilotti et al. that opening of the ion channel involves two steps after agonist is bound. Firstly a conformation change to a higher affinity (but still shut) form, followed by the conformation change from shut to open.
Official source
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