Drug class
Its Drug Evaluation and Research Center categorizes these medications based on both their chemical and therapeutic classes.[4] For example, fibrates are a chemical class of drugs (amphipathic carboxylic acids) that share the same mechanism of action (PPAR agonist), the same mode of action (reducing blood triglyceride levels), and are used to prevent and treat the same disease (atherosclerosis).Drug classes that share a common molecular mechanism of action modulate the activity of a specific biological target.Because of the disastrous reputation that the corticosteroids had got in the 1950s, the new term, which offered to signal that an anti-inflammatory drug was not a steroid, rapidly gained currency.Similarly, one might argue that the class of disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs (DMARD) is composed by one element ("disease-modifying") that albeit vaguely designates a mechanism of action, and one element ("anti-rheumatic drug") that indicates its therapeutic use.