Slashdot Mirror
16-Year-Old Discovers Potential Treatment For Cystic Fibrosis
Bob the Super Hamste writes "According to a story at LiveScience, a 16-year-old Canadian 11th grade student has discovered a possible treatment for cystic fibrosis. The treatment is a combination of two drugs which, in a computer simulation on the Canadian SCINET supercomputing network, did not interfere with each other while interacting with the defective protein responsible for the disorder. He has also tested the drug combination on living cells with results that 'exceeded his expectations.'"
n/t
Yes, if its one thing they are know for is not providing new drugs.
Idiot.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
as Big Pharm sues him for using their drugs in a manner not properly prescribed. This will effectively lock him down while they rebrand the drugs, package them, and patent the cure for their profit.
16 years old and the kid is doing drug trials? Back when I was in school we had to share Bunsen burners because there wasn't enough to go around.
I read the internet for the articles.
Notes:
11:45 am - Upon administration, injection site immediately burst into flames. Combustion of patients blood followed, with progressive explosive rupturing of all blood vessels in a pattern emanating from injection site. End-stage release of parasitic alien spores ( from eyeballs ) noted in earlier formulations has been reduced to a degree exceeding expectations. Recommend further human trials to determine ( presence of? ) risk factors for blood combustion.
As a 34 year old dealing with the health issues and the ridiculous costs that let me breathe, digest my food, and not be knocked on my butt by blood sugar spikes, I'm excited by this. Goes to show that sometimes we just need some fresh thought at a new problem - the traditional, mega-millions research methods may not be the answer. (similar to Space-X :: NASA)
The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit.
They are known for providing profitable drugs, and suppressing unprofitable drugs, or more accurately, drugs that interfere with the profitability of other drugs. For example, a drug that treats the symptoms of a disease, and needs to be taken for the duration of the patient's lifetime, would likely be a profitable drug. A drug that cures the disease with a single dose, while perhaps somewhat profitable on its own, would be devastating to the profitability of the first drug, and would therefore be a candidate for suppression.
In this particular case, however, the treatment involves the use of two existing drugs, so there's really no profitability to discuss.
Nah. Some kid who tested 6 different denture adhesives in Coke will win because the judges actually understand WTF he did. At least that's how it worked at science fairs when I was in school.
You probably should have learned how to explain your volcano better.
Fix Your Own TV - RiddledTV.com Avoid the Landfill
Idiot.
The poster implied that he would sell the rights to a pharma company and indeed licensing compounds from smaller companies/research labs is indeed standard practice. If you meant that the pharma companies don't have enough new drugs of their own, this is in fact wrong.
The second part of the post implied the kid would never be heard from again. If he made enough money it's possible. I'm guessing you misinterpreted this as a statement the company would buy his compound and it would never see the light of day, thus garnering your idiot comment. While it's not what he meant, it is in fact also common practice in pharma for companies to license the rights to compounds similar to those they are developing just to eliminate potential competition. It's why often when licensing a compound stipulations are added that the purchasing company must intend to develop it.
All of this is likely moot as the kid does not own the rights to the compounds. TFA doesn't specify whether they are novel but my guess would be he worked with a library of existing compounds that showed some activity against cystic fibrosis in preliminary screenings.
No, just drugs that they either didn't adequately test ... or that they selectively dropped the results indicating that they gave you a higher likelihood of killing you.
While Big Pharma does crank out drugs, they're not exactly showing a stellar track record of actually making sure they're safe. They mostly assume they're safe if it doesn't kill you in the first few weeks.
And, then of course there's the constant commercials for a drug you should "ask your doctor about" -- sometimes they don't say what it treats, but they give a litany of side effects which sound like you'd need to be desperate to try. So, when a patient goes into a doctor insisting they should get some astra-awesome-a or something, the doc just writes a scrip of gives out the free samples the sales rep dropped off.
You'll excuse us for not attributing any concern for our welfare to these companies. They're like the tobacco industry in a lot of ways ... it's in their interests to tell you their product is perfectly safe and didn't kill more than half of the 100 rats they tested on. At least, not right away.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I really wish there were a drug to cure (or at least stabalize) Sour Grape Syndrome (SGS).
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
Sorry, but this is *not* any innovative science. Rather, it is a computational reproduction of facts already well known. Nothing more than a typical molecular modeling class assignment during a graduate chemistry education.
He did not invent any new drugs - the really breakthrough was by the researchers of Vertex Pharmaceuticals, see for example VX-770.
He did not discover the mechanism of action of the drugs. Rather, he took published protein structures and published compounds and re-ran some docking studies (of the same type Vertex and other pharmaceutical companies probably spend hundreds of thousands of processor hours on, with the difficulty that they had to check tens of thousands of compounds, not just two already known to work).
He was not the first to notice that different promising compounds in clinical trials have different points of interaction with the defective proteins of CF. Thinking that a drug combination may be useful is not exactly a new and brilliant insight, and this was for example even discussed a couple of months ago in CE&N (the general chemistry member journal of the American Chemical Society). I am very confident that is has been evaluated before, and probably there are patents already filed.
The only interesting point here is that the guy is 16,not 20 or 22 like the normal chemistry student. But then pressing the right buttons in a molecular modeling software is really not that difficult, especially when you already know the outcome you want to reproduce.
Right, and suddenly as Lipitor's (atorvastatin) patent expires, every single patient is being switched to Crestor (rosuvastatin), a much newer and better (patented) drug.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
In that vein, FoldIt is a game where the goal is to make proteins that match target sites. Promising results get tested in labs. Same gist as what you suggest, but you get humans to play tetris instead of a computer trying random proteins.
To be fair, it is scientifically interesting if he can prove that the drugs in combination perform better than they do individually, and, if so, to what magnitude. Sometimes, making cocktails of drugs don't work due to unintended consequences or bad side effects; and sometimes it does. Show that he's mature enough to follow through on an interesting idea is what shows his potential as a scientist worth funding.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escitalopram would be a perfect example. Citalopram's patent expired, so they found a new way to encapsulate the drug so that they could continue to sell the patented version. The new drug works exactly the same way that the old drug worked, has exactly the same mechanism, and a nearly identical success rate in clinical trials, but because it's encapsulated, it's technically a different drug, so they were able to renew the patent. I would lay odds that they have already developped the replacement for when Escitalopram's patent expires.
It's also a perfect example of a case where medical professionals are lobbied to continue selling the expensive proprietary drug... because the patent has expired, you can get a generic off-label version of Citalopram for a fraction of the cost of Escitalopram, but doctors continue to prescribe the newer version because the company that makes it lobbies physicians against prescribing the cheaper drug. (and all of the references you seek are cited in the Wikipedia article above)
Here you go. Crestor will decrease your relative risk by 44-53% of an adverse cardiovascular event, depending on the study. Impressive (it cuts your risk in half!), until you find out that your absolute risk was around 1% to begin with. For this you are shelling out $200/month, every month. Is it better? Yes. Undoubtedly Crestor is better than Lipitor. Now let's talk a moment about actual disease prevention... does it make much more difference versus lipitor? Not really. 0.5% a year compared to 1% a year, hmm, I guess it only makes a difference if you are the rare person actually having a heart attack which could have been prevented by "upgrading" the drug. The other 99 people, however, are paying through the nose.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
You're an idiot. Let's break down how:
1) Life expectancy for people with CF is ~40-45 years today. WITH modern medical care.
2) The reportedly successful drug cocktail of two already-existing drugs:
a) Would extend the lives of those people with CF by years - meaning more sales over time;
b) Would require $0 new research to produce - these drugs already exist;
c) Would not "cure" the underlying genetic condition, meaning that if you have CF, you need this cocktail for as long as you're alive to manage your disease;
What world do you live in that increased sales to a new market, over a longer time frame, with zero up-front development costs equals "no profitability"?
Versus the "standard of care", which in this case was Lipitor. Ethics committees don't let you use "control" groups anymore in medicine. Your "control group" has to consist of the best available alternative drug, if one exists. If you think about it, it makes sense. You can't really give coronary patients sugar pills and tell them they're still receiving treatment. However giving them the best available treatment means they have nothing to lose if the test drug turns out to be no better than what is currently available.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Oh, so you shift the burden of payment to countries that don't do this. I love paying for Canadian health care here in the US!
Making fun of dumb people since 2009
But if you insist on citation, here is one: Roche Blocking Blindness Cure.
You can still get the generic of Celexa.i.e. Citalopram'
For someone who spouts off, you could at least know that Citalopram is the generic.
Medical professionals? that' term is so wide, it's non sense. Did nurses? Drs? or was it lobbied by the sales side of a pharma company?
Look, the pharmaceutical hires the best scientists in the world. They also hire the best sales people int he world.
They don't make a lot of profit, and the produce and sell some thing near cost becasue of the public good.;
They are very complex, and complexity added with something people don't understand makes a company a target to scare tactics, and falsehoods.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on