Prodrug not its intended target. This reduces adverse or unintended effects of a drug, especially important in treatments like chemotherapy, which can have severe unintended and undesirable side effects. Many herbal extracts historically used in medicine contain glycosides (sugar derivatives) of the active agent, which are hydrolyzed in the intestines to release the active and more bioavailable aglycone. For example, salicin is a β-D-glucopyranoside that is cleaved by esterases to release salicylic acid. Aspirin, acetylsalicylic acid, first made by Felix Hoffmann at Bayer in 1897, is a synthetic prodrug of salicylic acid. However, in other cases, such as codeine and morphine,
Mycophenolic acid studies have found it inferior to azathioprine. A combination of mycophenolate and ribavirin has been found to stop infection by and replication of dengue virus "in vitro". Mycophenolic acid Mycophenolic acid, also called mycophenolate, is an immunosuppressant drug used to prevent rejection in organ transplantation. It was initially marketed as the prodrug mycophenolate mofetil (MMF) to improve oral bioavailability. More recently, the salt mycophenolate sodium has also been introduced. Mycophenolate mofetil is marketed under the trade name CellCept and mycophenolate sodium as Myfortic. Discovered by an Italian medical scientist Bartolomeo Gosio in 1893, mycophenolic acid was the first antibiotic to