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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.'"
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.
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.
While we did not have drug trials at school, just outside our school there was a little park where you could sometimes find syringes from whatever drug research activities were going on overnight.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.