Slashdot Mirror
Crowdsourcing the Discovery of New Antibiotics
First time accepted submitter Josiah Zayner writes "Katie Drummond at The Verge reports that 'the Infectious Diseases Society of America warned that the pipeline of new antibiotics was "on life support," with only seven drugs in advanced stages of development to treat multidrug-resistant gram-negative superbugs. That's in part because, unlike drugs prescribed to treat chronic conditions, antibiotics are only taken for a few days or weeks at a time — meaning they're less profitable for pharmaceutical companies.' Dr. Josiah Zayner, a synthetic biology fellow at NASA, and Dr. Mark Opal, a neurobiologist and drug development specialist have started an Indiegogo campaign: The ILIAD Project. ILIAD stands for the International Laboratory for Identification of Antibacterial Drugs. Contributors to the project will receive Science kits with all the materials needed for testing environmental samples, such as plants, insects, and bacteria, for antibiotic properties. The information will then be documented in Open manner on Wiki-style website to create the first Massively Multi-Scientist Open Experiment."
See the failure here: They only make money when people are sick. The economics are not there to make people better. The economics are there to make a profit off as many sick people for as long as possible.
We really need to work on a new system where the profit is in healthy people not sick people.
1. They're really going to let random people experiment with horrific, drug-resistant pathogens? If not, how else are they going to test stuff?
2. Who gets the patent, when the crowdsource does 99% of the work and PharmaCorp does the final tests of the end result?
That's one way to spin medical testing on humans.
Medicine testing is expensive so lets make the populous make up the difference for businesses, again. Of course, any discoveries will go up the stack while the bullshit goes down the stack until we put it all in a nice walled garden and charge access so terrorists can't use it.
If, for instance, the traditional method of giving the financial burden of medical research to pharmaceutical companies, in exchange for patents which allow them to recoup their losses, is too costly to the public, in terms of both availability of existing treatment (companies have to make their money back somehow) and development of new treatments (since medical researchers have to take care not to infringe on the patents of others, even if it means skipping out on a potential cure for, say, cancer) then possibly, we could try an entirely new approach. Say, asking from the general public a portion of their wages in exchange for an investment into such research. We could even make it compulsory; after all, the benefits of advanced and available medical care benefit the whole of society, as opposed to say, an investment in a company like General Motors, which would do little to secure the welfare of the general population.
Maybe we ought to form an organization dedicated to ensuring the well being of the public. Could work.
Anyone know what the plan is for the IP, if any should arise out of this? I don't think the testers need to have ownership of something they find essentially randomly, but I'd be a bit uncomfortable with the idea of selling it as Open-with-a-capital-O in the open-source software vein if the outcome is that the two guys who run it arrange an exclusive license with big pharma and walk away with all the revenue.
I can see that maybe there will not be any IP, if all the experimental results are posted as soon as they are submitted, but if this is getting monetized (including e.g. priority access to the data for anyone), I'd like to see the proceeds used for some charitable purpose. Or, if they do want to keep the IP to themselves, I'd be cool with that as long as they are open about their intentions from day 1, so people know what they are signing up for.
I just noticed the submitter is one of the two guys in question - can you please comment on this? I don't see any details on the web site. Sorry for coming across so negative, the concept is great.
PS what bacteria are you using, and do you think it might be a good idea to include some yeast in the kit as controls to look for prokaryote-specific effects? You could even engineer them with markers so you could run them on the same plate and look for changes in color ratio or something. I think GFP is off patent now, for example. Data on specificity could greatly increase the usefulness of the results.
Mark Ungrin
TFS says "only seven ... in advanced stages of development". How many new antibiotics do we need in the next five or ten years? If seven are in advanced stages of development, that means there are a couple dozen in earlier stages, to go up for approval twenty years from now. Do we need a dozen brand new antibiotics every year? Should we be skeptical of this article's assumption that seven at a time isn't enough?
I've been reading Derek Lowe's blog (http://www.pipeline.corante.com/) for some time, since finding out about his "Things I Won't Work With" series of posts (hilarious, highly recommended). He's a drug discovery chemist. Several of his recent posts have actually discussed this issue of pharma companies not currently developing many new antibiotics.
Based on what I've learned by following him, this crowdsourcing effort seems very unlikely to change anything. Identifying potential drug candidates "in vitro" (i.e. in a petri dish) is the easy part. Getting them to function "in vivo" (in a living animal such as a rodent, and eventually humans), and finding ones which not only work in vivo but also are not excessively toxic, that's the hard part. For almost every successful drug, there were hundreds or thousands of other candidates which looked great in vitro but were ineffective in vivo, or too toxic to use. The process of screening drug candidates to find winners is hideously expensive, and completely out of reach of amateurs.
In other words, this project follows the classic (and useless) "idea-man" pattern: it "solves" the easy part of the problem (generating ideas / drug candidates) without having any plan for the hard stuff. It will therefore ultimately depend on pharma companies anyways. You know, the same ones which aren't terribly interested in doing the hard and expensive work on antibiotic candidates because the economics look bad to them right now.
IMO, we as a society should instead be pushing issues like: "Why are we so slavishly devoted to the notion that funding for drug discovery must derive from capitalistic market forces"? This seems like the very definition of a problem which should be addressed by spending tax money on antibiotic research. Same goes for many other categories of drug.
The other part of the conversation should be "why are we so devoted to not cracking down on antibiotic overprescription and unprescribed use of antibiotics in both human and veterinary medicine"? (That being why old antibiotics are losing effectiveness.) Once again, obvious candidates for government action.
(But this is slashdot, so I predict libertarian resistance to sensible ideas about public policy and spending.)
Still the most potent anti-biotic on the planet is plain old penicillin. And no, Amoxycillin and all its derivatives aren't the same and aren't better. UNLESS you are allergic to penicillin. Then you have no choice. Thing is, penicillin is about a nickel a pill and it works much faster. No money in it for the drug companies.
Same with sweeteners. Still the safest on the market is saccharin. But the patent ran out on it so the drug companies again needed a way to make money.
Wuddooeyeno? IITYWYBMAD? Like nuts? eclecticallyincorrect.com
The main problem is overuse of antibiotics - both in the food supply itself, and in every day usage, is breeding resistance to our current antibiotics. Combined with people going off meds before the antiobiotic regime is completed.
Discovering "new" antibiotics won't make that problem go away.
Fix the source of the problem not the symptom.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Say, asking from the general public a portion of their wages in exchange for an investment into such research.
Let's construct a mathematical model(*).
Define a block and call it "the public". Note that this block consists many little blocks, each representing an individual member of the public.
Define another block and call it "medical services". This block also consists of lots of little blocks, but somewhat fewer than the "public" blocks since 1 hospital will serve more than one person &c.
Draw arrows representing the flow money from the "public" block to the "medical" block. We can construct the arrows any way we want - each arrow can be an "average" consumer, or we can have a range of consumers, or we can mirror the actual population one-for-one. Bundle the arrows into a flow or "river" that represents the money going from the public to the medical services.
Now place a block in the middle of that flow, between the consumers and the services. Call this block "the corporation".
From a games-theory point of view, the goal of the corporation is to divert as much of the money stream as possible into its own coffers. If the diverted money optional, then the company has to compete for the streams: it has to provide a service which the public thinks is worth the amount of money diverted.
If the diverted money is not optional, then the corporation need not supply any benefit or services. Indeed, the corporation benefits by increasing the input money flow to the maximum amount that the system can handle, and reducing the output money flow to the minimum amount the system can tolerate.
I'm happy to support legislation/regulation that will solve a problem. Can you find a solution where the players have incentive to provide the best value... for the public?
(*) Wildly simplistic for illustration, but the trends are overwhelming: accurate refinements will show the same result.
This is an interesting proposal to combat the "death of antibiotic" problem. Even if it were wildly sucessful, though, I fear that big business may not take up the results that are found, though. For one, although discovering new sources does remove some of the capital hurdles to development, a substantial part of the cost of drug development is the large clinical studies that must be undertaken in order to garner FDA approval. This project would do nothing to solve that problem.
In addition, it raises some interesting IP issues that may make pharma balk--if I discover some natural substance has antibiotic properties, do I earn an inventor title on the patent and partial royalities for the development?
What is really needed, I think, is a diversion of part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget toward research that would otherwise be avoided due to the lack of profit at the end. Even as someone, who, myself is funded by NIH, I think we could make better use of some of the many billions a year by re-directing them.
That all said, if the project is not viewed with the end goal of developing new antibiotics, but instead viewed as a project designed to encourage particiaption in modern biology--an educational project that might cause a discovery, it's hard to think of it as anything but a fanstastic idea.
-Ryan
AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
A bunch of scientists with enough spare time who apparently can't find enough funding to be fully employed experimenting with antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria in their spare time in their make-shift private labs...
Or better yet some wannabe scientists that think they know what they are doing trying their first experiments with antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria in their basements and garages.
What could possibly go wrong?
Still the most potent anti-biotic on the planet is plain old penicillin. And no, Amoxycillin and all its derivatives aren't the same and aren't better. UNLESS you are allergic to penicillin. Then you have no choice. Thing is, penicillin is about a nickel a pill and it works much faster. No money in it for the drug companies.
Same with sweeteners. Still the safest on the market is saccharin. But the patent ran out on it so the drug companies again needed a way to make money.
Okay, I'll bite...
Except for the small fact that penicillin is basically ineffective against most gram-negative bacteria (because of the outer membrane of GN-bacteria). Many common bacterial including E coli, H pylori, and various strains of Salmonella are gram negative and can cause various problems if they infect certain tissues in the body. This particular campaign was for drugs that attack gram-negative bacteria (the trial kits test against a supposedly non-pathogenic strain of E coli).
Also most artificial sweeteners are all pretty much all poison (saccaharin included), and even worse they generally haven't been show to actually prevent any of the problems associated with high sugar intake (including weight gain, diabetes and cardiac issues). Even mostly natural substitutes are generally high in fructose (yes the same "F" that is in HFCS) and that includes honey and agave syrup. The jury is out on Stevia and Monk Fruit. Just eat less sweet stuff.
You are so full of shit I don't even know where to begin.
For one thing, drug resistant infection is quite common, and becoming more so every month. I have no idea what led you to believe antibiotic resistance isn't a serious problem. Cite me a respected public health organization that isn't seriously concerned; I doubt you can even find me one that isn't outright shitting their pants.
And all your pro-market babble toward the end of that giant paragraph is pure sociopathy. "Moreover, undiscovered antibiotics are probably better left undiscovered until we learn our lesson about wasting them on livestock." Fuck planning for the future, right? We can totally outpace organisms that replicate in hours or days once we put the mighty human free-market after it, right?
It's OK if a few hundred million people die agonizing deaths; in the long run you're perfectly confident that the market value of new antibioitics will rise faster than the body count. The rest of us are not confident, and not willing to risk our very lives depending the companies that for the last 20 years have focused on six-figure cancer treatments. lifestyle drugs, and whining for tax breaks.
So we can waste them on livestock and toddlers with viral ear infections but sufficiently-whiny mothers?
Fuck that! Until the FDA and the WHO outright ban the use of ALL antibiotics, including for veterinary use, without the presence of either a (human-)life-threatening situation or a positive ID on the pathogen, I have zero interest in helping our little "better than apex predator" buddies evolve resistance to yet another class of effective ways to keep me alive when they decide I look like a tasty place to raise a family.
It seems you've missed the point of the joke (which implies that we ought to have a government that actually takes care of things which are vital to society), but thank you for displaying your resplendent knowledge of game theory.
In all fairness, it's hard to tell that it was a joke.
In any event, I agree with you that the government should work for the benefit of the people. I'm still playing with message delivery - using a math construction to see if it plays well to an audience of geeks. We'll see how it gets modded in the next day or so.
Why is the parent not modded up?
On the one hand I agree with you. Things can hit a critical point fast if human beings are not careful.
On the other hand(this one is my right hand I think) comfortability is what allows us humans to spend time thinking and developing technology and cool things and beautiful things! Where does one draw a line like you said. What if I am in extreme pain but it is not life threatening and the lab test for the bacteria takes two days? I guess we could make people suffer or we could give them antibiotics in hopes that the diagnosis was correct. Are you going to be the one that rejects giving the whiny mother the antibiotic only to have her child die? Maybe the chances are highly unlikely but who is the one who is going to be responsible for that?
In my view humans are super awesome. We can come up with new technology and invent ways to try and overcome difficult problems. As I said. Maybe you are correct and we are just creating super bacteria that are going to wipe us out. I guess I am just _hoping_ that we as humans overcome in the end. Maybe naively.
Not that I have the urge to track down death caps or anything, but I have noticed that NOTHING seems to munch on or infect poison oak (at least where I live). It stays nice, glossy green until the leaves turn in the fall, without wilting or mold or any other ailment I can see on other plants. It would be interesting to see if the urushiol oil or something else protected it.
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What if I am in extreme pain but it is not life threatening and the lab test for the bacteria takes two days?
Opiates do amazing things. Pity, really, that some humans have a problem with moderation, because vicodin counts as the single best flu remedy ever.
Are you going to be the one that rejects giving the whiny mother the antibiotic only to have her child die?
Not too many people die of ear infections - Even mild hearing loss counts as a relatively low-frequency outcome. And unlike the whiny mother, a real live doctor can actually tell whether the screaming kid has a serious risk of dying or not. That said - Yes. Yes, I would make that call, and I would defend it after-the-fact, if felt I had made the right decision up front. People die, and that includes sick kids, that even includes me! And I can accept that. But y'know, if I someday die of polydrug resistant TB rather than heart disease or cancer or a bus or "misadventure", I sincerely hope an afterlife exists just so I can haunt every GP who helped make the fluoroquinolones useless rather than dare say "No!" to their patients.
Infections are bad. Sometimes they are really bad. I can't say I have ever had a serious infection. Could be I've had an extremely lucky life in this first world country I live in. I'm sure that factors in there somewhere. I have had lots of cuts, scrapes, breaks and even a tear of an epic nature. (I was a young teen, running through a field and tripped on a fallen and very old barbed wire fence while wearing sandals. Ripped a very bad area on the top of my foot... looked like a skinned catfish.) I was in a hospital within 2-3 hours, got shots, stitches and released within a few minutes of that. I'm sure some antibiotics were used during that event.
Not going to deny that antibiotics can save lives and limbs.
But we've got to have some sense and wisdom about this stuff. We need some tests not just for natural antibody counts, but for artificial antibody (antibiotics) counts as well. Ideally levels for antibiotics should be at or very nearly zero at any given time. This best enables the body's own natural immune system to function which keeps people generally more healthy and keeps vaccines more effective. (Did you know that a vaccine is useless without a healthy immune system? That's right. You already knew it too! You know a vaccine is a deactivated virus. You know that the body's immune system will adapt itself around the foreign invader to build resistance to it. So naturally, the immune system has to be healthy for this plan to work effectively right?) So it is absolutely critical that antibiotics levels are monitored and minimized.
While I'm not decided on it, I have given some thought to the AIDS situation and wonder how much of it may actually be caused by things other than a virus attacking the immune systems of people. (Not saying AIDS doesn't exist!) We have lots and lots of reasons why a person might have a weakened or even disabled immune system not the least of which is overexposure to antibiotics. I am reminded of the increased rate of diabetes in the US and its lose connection with HFCS. Here we have a body's sugar handling systems getting burned out from handling too much HFCS resulting in a broken system, or diabetes. I have to wonder if there are things other than HIV which may be attacking or even overloading the immune systems of people which leads to a broken immune system? I'm not expert on the topic, but given the general demographic of people with such problems, it would seem to me there may be more to it than gay sex and needle sharing which is at the source.
Regardless of anything else, I think it should be very well accepted that maintaining a strong and healthy immune system should be focus #1 of maintaining health among humans. Creating new antibiotics to handle the super-bugs resulting from the over-use of older antibiotics and/or the persistence of antibiotics in our food and water doesnt seem like a smart answer.
You have no Proof those Antibiotic substances kill Germs.. we know this is true because we stopped you before you misled the Public
Open Crowdsourcing Cretens.. the Public can't handle all this new information your throwing at them.. IckiePedia.. what is this IckiePedia?
It's one of them darn Tubes isn't it!
Banned.. Ban you All
Let's see if they 'crowd-source' the profits and / or stock options when the results are commercialised.
I bought a kit because I think this would be fun to do with my daughter. It is worth it for that experience alone. This also seems like a very fun activity to do for a classroom project. You get to go out and find things you want to sample, then do the test, etc. Geo tagging, and the like as well. Maybe it wont ultimately be successful, but it will certainly be a fun and educational experience for the participants.