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Blowfish Poison Derivative Could Be A Painkiller
Makarand writes "According to this Reuters article, a Vancouver (Canada) based company
is testing a
painkiller derived from blowfish poison.
The drug
has passed two phases of clinical tests and during testing it could ease pain in terminally
ill cancer patients with a dosage of few micrograms. The drug is a sodium channel blocker and works by stopping nerves from sending pain signals to the brain. The company says that the drug does not have the side effects of morphine and is non-addictive. A single blowfish can provide about 600 doses of this drug."
Funny how the medical field is quick to adopt things like leeches, but when it comes to medical marijuana, they don't want to legalize it because "it's not an isolated and purified medication".
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
will run about $500/per dose? Remember recouping R&D is expensive.
Funny how the layman makes bold assumptions that make way for long diatribes.
The grandparent's post was completely valid, insofar as there at least exists a double standard for "nature's" cures. Research on the medicinal effects (primary and "side") of marijuana is virtually absent because researchers are afraid of federal agents in ski masks kicking down their doors.
And yet you still suggest we should trust the experts, even though they admit to having virtually no studies to base any conclusions on.
STFU.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
Also in my experience doctors tend to be more wary of anything that remotely resembles "alternative" medicines, for usually unsurprising reasons - leeches? I suspect anyone making a drug based on leeches is going to go to great pains to disguise that fact...
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
There are some government shills in the medical field that go on political shows and present such arguments.
Interestingly, it's by no means every government employed MD, there are many within the NIH and other government organizations who have rational ideas about illegal drugs, they are just regularly ignored if they speak out.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
I don't see why this is news worthy. Just about *every* single drug today has its origins in some marine life (or bacteria/mold). For instance, many research groups get millions of grant dollars flying to remote areas, cutting up the local inhabitants, and then running cell assays on them. If they make it through a certain number of assays (generally for cytoxicity, but others exist) then they publish the info. Just check out the Journal of Natural Products. Issues upon issues of this stuff. The interesting stuff comes later, when the synthetic organic chemists try to create these things artificially, generally in really low yields. In fact, a project I was working on was the synthesis of a marine ladder toxin that is one of the active compounds in red tide catastrophes (see this book). It too blocks sodium ion channels. Probably the most famous cancer fighting compound, taxol, is isolated from the bark of the pacific yew tree.
We have so much to learn from nature !!
An excellent point, but we need to be cautious. Although we have many medicines derived from natural sources, these natural substances require just as much scrutiny as man-made synthetic ones. Most natural medicines are derived from what amounts to chemical weapons created by organisms to either kill/disable prey or kill/sicken predators. As such, they can have nasty side-effects.
A blowfish, leech, or cannibis plant does not care if a person gets cancer 10 years later, suffers permanent neurological damage, or occasionally dies abruptly. In many cases, extreme toxic reactions are the entire point of the chemical. On the one hand, humans have millions of years of evolution to adapt to these natural chemicals. On the other hand, these organisms have had millions of evolution to create ever nastier defensive/offensive chemicals.
Even long-used natural medicines can be unsafe. Very few cultures have had the inclination and record-keeping skills to correlate medicine consumption with long-term illnesses like cancer, dementia, heart disease, liver disease, etc. Very few cultures have had the numerical sample size to detect medicines that might be fatal on a rare but consistent basis. Despite a multi-thousand-year history of use, it was only in the last few decades that we uncovered the link between willow bark (aspirin) and Reyes syndrome (which is rare but fatal for children).
Just because something is natural, does not make it safe. Whether blowfish toxin or leech saliva make a good medications will take millions of dollars of clinical research and then perhaps millions of patients to discover.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Nobody's doing leeches as a recreational drug. Putting marijuana into pharmacies has a huge social implication far beyond it's medical effectiveness.