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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."
Prize money. Put up a $5 billion prize for the first company to get past the FDA.
Of course, this will provide an incentive for them to hide bad long-term results, but hey, we have a little of that now and decent systems in place to deal with it. Pay out only partially with full payment after 5 years of use or something if you really want to.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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! --
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.
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.