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A drug class is a set of medications and other compounds that have a similar chemical structures, the same mechanism of action , a related mode of action, and/or are used to treat the same disease.
In several dominant drug classification systems, these four types of classifications form a hierarchy. For example, the fibrates are a chemical class of drugs that share the same mechanism of action and mode of action , and that are used to prevent and treat the same disease. Conversely, not all PPAR agonists are fibrates, not all triglyceride lowering agents are PPAR agonists, and not all drugs used to treat atherosclerosis are triglyceride-lowering agents.
A drug class is typically defined by a prototype drug, the most important, and typically the first developed drug within the class, used as a reference for comparison.