This is all well and good, but if you don't design new DNA transcription and mRNA translation machinery (tRNA) to deal with these new bases, your body will have no way to create new proteins with the new DNA bases. No new proteins = useless new DNA.
The academic medical center lab I work in is trying to develop a new cancer therapeutic. We'll be starting up phase I (toxicity) clinical trials soon. The reason academia (what the NIH funds) can't completely bring a new drug to market is multifactorial: It's pretty much impossible to get much past a phase II (dosing and efficacy) trial in academics because phase III (therapeutic vs. gold standard) trials usually take thousands of patients and years to complete and are as expensive as hell. Even if you can get past phase III (and it takes up to 15 years and half a billion dollars from when something works in the lab until it's routinely given to patients), we still can't manufacture therapeutics on a large (commercial) scale in the lab. Part of the reason we use industry to bring therapeutics we've developed to market is that we are just not (in academics) set up to do it on our own. I don't particularly like working with private companies but we really have no other option.
Perhaps the NIH should buy a small generic pharmaceutical producer to make the drugs we develop. The FDA should also be less stringent in the drugs it approves: once you figure out toxicity and dosing, the therapeutics should be routinely available. Yes, there will be unforeseen toxicities associated with the therapeutics that we don't know about because we've only used the therapeutic on a couple of hundred people, but how many people are dying/suffering large morbidity because it takes that extra ten years to get a therapeutic to market?
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This is all well and good, but if you don't design new DNA transcription and mRNA translation machinery (tRNA) to deal with these new bases, your body will have no way to create new proteins with the new DNA bases. No new proteins = useless new DNA.
The academic medical center lab I work in is trying to develop a new cancer therapeutic. We'll be starting up phase I (toxicity) clinical trials soon. The reason academia (what the NIH funds) can't completely bring a new drug to market is multifactorial: It's pretty much impossible to get much past a phase II (dosing and efficacy) trial in academics because phase III (therapeutic vs. gold standard) trials usually take thousands of patients and years to complete and are as expensive as hell. Even if you can get past phase III (and it takes up to 15 years and half a billion dollars from when something works in the lab until it's routinely given to patients), we still can't manufacture therapeutics on a large (commercial) scale in the lab. Part of the reason we use industry to bring therapeutics we've developed to market is that we are just not (in academics) set up to do it on our own. I don't particularly like working with private companies but we really have no other option.
Perhaps the NIH should buy a small generic pharmaceutical producer to make the drugs we develop. The FDA should also be less stringent in the drugs it approves: once you figure out toxicity and dosing, the therapeutics should be routinely available. Yes, there will be unforeseen toxicities associated with the therapeutics that we don't know about because we've only used the therapeutic on a couple of hundred people, but how many people are dying/suffering large morbidity because it takes that extra ten years to get a therapeutic to market?