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?
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.
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.)
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! --