My conversation with Lars Larson covered some new medical breakthroughs, from desperately-needed new antibiotics to the rapidly expanding applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in medicine.
drug discovery
Antibe Therapeutics has been developing otenaproxesul, a "miracle drug" that, at least in early trials, controlled both pain and inflammation -- but without the side effects of NSAID drugs. However, the company hit a snag and is now going in a different direction. Will it succeed?
I've been following (and writing about) Antibe Therapeutics' otenaproxesul, an atypical NSAID without the GI toxicity of Aleve or Advil, since early 2020. It's been nothing but good news. Until now. Otenaproxesul caused a substantial jump in liver enzymes in some clinical trial participants. Can the company overcome this? Wall Street sure doesn't think so.
The New York Times (correctly) reports that a COVID pill is needed, not just a vaccine. But the paper also tells this story in its typically biased manner, implying that the government, not drug companies, discover drugs. It's a bunch of nonsense that dates back to... forever.
When I wrote about "Magic Aleve" -- a derivative of Aleve/naproxen that appears to be both G.I.-friendly and a more potent analgesic/antiinflammatory than Aleve itself -- a number of questions arose. Dr. John Wallace, CSO of Antibe, which is developing the drug called ATB-346, kindly agreed to answer them.
There hasn't been a material advance in the pharmacological treatment of pain since the 1890s, when heroin and aspirin were invented. That may change if an experimental drug being developed by a Toronto-based drug company keeps performing in advanced clinical trials. This could be huge.
Drug discovery is a long, arduous process. Chemists and biologists have been eternally looking for methods to shorten it by trying to differentiate between chemical compounds that simply pop up in a test and those that have promise as drugs. Chris Gerry, a Harvard graduate student in Prof. Stuart's Chemistry & Chemical Biology group, describes a new, elegant where DNA is used to test "good" molecules, trillions at a time.
Given therapeutics in the cancer category dominate the list is not so surprising, given the hefty price tag they yield. Where there is a great return there tends to be a great investment.
Drug discovery is a long, tortuous and impossibly difficult job. A group at the University of Warwick has come up with a mathematical model that seems to be a very big step in streamlining the process. But is it really? To answer this we need to take a look at how drugs are discovered.
Due to the opaque nature of the pharmaceutical industry’s disclosures, a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine sought to quantify a standard amount companies spent on the research and development of cancer drugs. Do these R&D costs justify such high prices and revenues?
With the recent discovery of polymyxin-resistant infection here in the U.S., there's a renewed pledge among drug developers and the government to incentivize research for developing new antibiotics, previously a seemingly abandoned effort.
A protein involved in pathological angiogenesis can serve as a new therapeutic target in the treatment of chronic liver disease, which claims nearly 50,000 lives annually. In vivo tests involving knock-out mice has shown promising results.