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Crowdsourcing Project Predicts Progression of ALS
sciencehabit writes Using data from old clinical trials, two groups of researchers have found a better way to predict how amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) progresses in different patients. The winning algorithms—designed by non-ALS experts—outperformed the judgments of a group of ALS clinicians given the same data. The advances could make it easier to test whether new drugs can slow the fatal neurodegenerative disease. For the competition, participants were given just a slice of this data set, collected over 3 months, and asked to design an algorithm to predict how patients would fare in the subsequent 9 months, according to a standard functional scale that measures their ability to move and care for themselves. When predictions from the two winning algorithms were combined, they outperformed estimates solicited from a dozen ALS clinicians who pored over the same data, the authors report. They estimate that using these algorithms to predict outcomes could allow a drug sponsor to reduce the size of the trial by at least 20% and save as much as $6 million in a large phase III trial.
Seems to me that drug makers will charge whatever maximizes their sales revenue, regardless of their development costs.
Lowering their development costs for them might affect whether or not they bring it to market. But if they do, they'll charge as much as they can get away with.
I would say very much so, considering he's been dead for 73 years.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
I would say very much so, considering he's been dead for 73 years.
Or is it???
Damn I've netflix'ed too many zombie movies lately.
oh, snap. Ya got me.
Or is it?
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
They should rename it Stephen Hawkings disease
Actually, the ALS Association is trying to just get it commonly called ALS, so as to emphasize that anyone can get it.
To be honest, I prefer the name Lou Gehrig's. Everyone knows about it that way.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Everyone in the US, but in the rest of the world almost no one knows who Lou Gehrig was.
It's better to call deceases by their medical names and not based on some person's name.
They can't validate a scale using unintervened progression or existing treatments, then pretend it says ANYTHING about a new/unknown treatment. The whole point of a new treatment is to alter the progression of the disease in a new/different way; the whole point of clinical trials is to determine the NEW course of the disease using the NEW treatment.
The claim made here is: a better tool to predict the time progression of headaches treated with aspirin (or beer or sex) can better predict the time progression of a headache treated with some yet-uninvented drug, so we needn't test the new treatment as thoroughly to characterize it. That's like saying "the more predictable sex with your partner is, the more you know about sex with a different partner"
And yes, I AM a physician and molecular biologist.
Please can we have using TLAs without explaining them made a criminal offence.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
I don't know if the summary was edited but this is in the summary: "a better way to predict how amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) progresses in different patients"
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
To me the most interesting part of the article is the creation of the PRO-ACT database. It's an incredible chunk of data, and I hope it inspires similar projects.
The ALS association obviously wants people to use ALS because its good branding for them.
In the UK and Commonwealth Countries it's known as Motor Neuron Disease.
The savings amount to using previous trial data as a control, which would never be accepted by the FDA in drug trials because it won't control for any features specific to the actual drug trial.
This also shows that large amounts of modern medicine, including high tech specialties like neuroscience, have not been subjected to basic statistical analysis and evaluation. There is a lot of benefit to gained in proper digital medical records and making anonymised data available to statisticians and researchers. There is no reason by the medical data on everybody in the Developed World isn't being used to look for correlations and evaluate medical treatments.
There are a couple of drug trials for ALS in progress, but it isn't an area that isn't highly attractive to drug companies. There is no proven cause so what to target is a crap shoot. Most patients suffer from sALS (randomly occurring) and only live 2-4 years from diagnosis. Neurodegenerative diseases and protein folding diseases in general have proven a money pit for research. Many of the drugs that have gotten onto the market do bugger all and there are no cures. Riluzole is the only effective drug for ALS, its a failed psychotropic drug that slow progression of ALS by an average of 9%, but it can't be taken once respiratory function becomes compromised. Researcher from other sources into the cause and mechanism is probably going to have make a breakthrough first.