Question: can catalyst be used for medical reasons, in medison? sorry about spellings

Luke Williams answered on 21 Jun 2016:

Enzymes and catalysts don’t tend to be used as medicines, no. Generally this is because you may have unintended side effects of that enzyme working all over the body, not to mention that a foreign enzyme would induce an immune response, causing many many problems.

What are often used though are inhibitors – so chemicals are taken which are direct inhibitors of a particular enzyme in the body. A great deal of work is done in this field to determine what chemicals inhibit which enzymes. Importantly though a good inhibitor must work at very low concentrations against one particular enzyme with little to no effect on any other enzyme. In practice though, this is incredibly difficult, and I think it is a major reason why various drugs have side effects.