Open Source Drug Discovery Prompts a Fundamental Heart Failure Breakthrough 160
An anonymous reader writes "Case-Western researchers, led by Saptarsi Haldar MD., have made a fundamental discovery that could prevent heart failure after reviewing the "chemical recipe" for a cancer-treating molecule made open source by Jay Bradner MD. (whose TED Talk articulates the open source approach to drug discovery) This cross-discipline discovery, which was published in the August 2013 issue of CELL, is a fundamental breakthrough in heart failure research, and highlights the value of an open source approach outside of software development."
open source? (Score:1)
What does it mean for a molecule to have source? How is the "source" of the molecule distinct from whatever passes for a "compiled binary"?
TED talk explains how the OSS philosophy applies (Score:5, Informative)
What does it mean for a molecule to have source?
It can refer to what Eric S. Raymond referred to as the "bazaar" model [wikipedia.org], or it can refer to a license that grants rights to the public analogous to those listed in the DFSG or FSF definition of free software. I see hints of bazaar in the transcript of the TED talk:
And here I see the spirit of publishing a discovery instead of locking it up behind secrecy and exclusive rights:
This leads up to the benefits of bazaar and publication:
And finally, a direct answer to your question as to what is the source code of a molecule:
Re:TED talk explains how the OSS philosophy applie (Score:4, Insightful)
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trade secrets, which means that the discovery is not made available to all
Which is extraordinarily difficult for drugs, because everyone will simply buy a bunch of their competitors' pills, and figure out exactly what they're made of down to atomic detail. A typical university chemistry lab could do this in a few days. There are some aspects that are more tricky - the exact packaging is sometimes key to getting the drug absorbed by the body at the desired rate, and the chemical synthesis can be messy - bu
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Can you get away with not telling the FDA what is in a drug?
Seems counter-intuitive.
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Re: TED talk explains how the OSS philosophy appli (Score:2, Informative)
The "patron system" is already in place - the gov't foots the bill for nearly all the research, and private corporations add the last 1% of the bill before patenting and reaping 100% of the profits.
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they would compete in the way they used to compete.. by being the best in making the compound.
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This generous benefactor could be the government, you know.
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Really it costs $14K to manufacture? Without counting NRE? I have strong doubts that any drug costs that much to manufacture given how much automation is in place for drug manufacturing.
NRE = Non-Recurrent Engineering (just so I'm not accused of being obscure)
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It costs $1 billion I believe to bring a drug to market, that's not engineering costs but rather FDA costs and costs of failed drugs. Drug trials are not cheap and you don't really know which ones will work beforehand.
Someone needs to pay that or the drug can never be manufactured and sold. Do you have a billion lying around and are you willing to hope people pay you back?
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Rakishi, you are proceeding down a line which is irrelevant to the question I asked. My question was specifically aimed at pepty's absurd assertion that a drug costs $14K to manufacture per patient per year. I understand the absurd costs to get past the FDA hurdles, those are a different question though. ...Anyone? ...Anyone?
Again:
a drug that costs $14K to manufacture per patient per year?
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http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4050587&cid=44499733
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4050587&cid=44499185
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There is automation in chemical synthesis and biological production of actual production batches of drugs, but it's not the kind that leads to unattended operation. Most of that type of automation is way downstream at the packaging stage.
Drug manufacturing costs:
small molecules (example: ibuprofen): $1 per gram
peptides (synthetic insulin): $50-1000 per gram
antibodies (Herceptin, Avastin): $500 - 5000 per gram
The $14K figure was the cost of materials for 1 patient year of a peptide AIDS drug. The starting ma
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Here's an article on the AIDS drug I was talking about. My number was from a personal communication.
http://www.aidshealth.org/archives/news/birth-of-aids-drug-is-10-year-tale
All along, producing Fuzeon on a commercial scale had been a concern. The cost of producing the drug for Phase I clinical trials was thousands of dollars per gram, said Michael Recny, Trimeris vice president of corporate development. With a prescribed dosage of roughly 80 grams a year, that translated into hundreds of thousands of dollars per patient.To streamline the process, the company recruited three manufacturing experts from what today is GlaxoSmithKline, a giant London-based pharmaceutical company with a U.S. headquarters in Research Triangle Park. Those experts came up with a shortcut. T-20 is a chain of 36 amino acids, and the company had been constructing it by adding a single amino acid at a time. The new team found a way to produce large quantities of three shorter chains, which could then be combined to create a fully-formed T-20. Even so, making the drug requires 106 steps, more than 10 times the norm. About 45 pounds of raw material are needed to produce 1 pound of Fuzeon. The production cost is cited as a driving force behind Fuzeon’s high price. Bolognesi, who remained at Duke in the company’s early years but was recruited to be CEO four years ago, said that because the cost of making Fuzeon is at least 10 times that of existing AIDS drugs, the profit margins on Fuzeon will be “significantly less” than with other AIDS drugs.
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So there's no difference between the instruction on how to create a substance and the substance itself?
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So there's no difference between the instruction on how to create a substance and the substance itself?
Yes, there is a big difference.The instructions are much more valuable. The instructions never go bad. The substance itself will eventually go bad.
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Yeah, just as there is no difference between an algorithm/source code and machine code that implements it. Both are equally readable, right?
Readable for who?
To a person well versed int the arts? Absolutely.
To a decompiler, you bet. The code you get out of a decompile may not look like the original, but it is still the code.
Scripting languages (Score:2)
In the software world, there is a very big difference between source code and executable binaries.
Authors of computer programs stored in files whose names end in .js, .py, or .pl might disagree with you. Glance up at the location bar to see "comments.pl", then look at this page's markup to see "engage.js".
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And neither of those are executable by hardware. Virtual machines are just more software and do not count for this discussion.
Since i686 (Score:2)
Awe Man! (Score:5, Funny)
What's this?! Everyone jumping on the Socialist-Commie-Pinko Open movement?!?
WTF!
Before you know it, IP with be severely weakened and all of us will have increased standard of living - except for the poor poor billionaires!
Won't someone think of the billionaires?!
Without the billionaires lording over us, what will inspire us?
We need IP to keep up the carriers to entry! We need to impede progress in order to preserve the billionaires! Our way of life will be destroyed!
Re:Awe Man! (Score:5, Insightful)
Before you know it, IP with be severely weakened and all of us will have increased standard of living - except for the poor poor billionaires!
Look, if we don't run our society according to everything that seemed like a good idea in 1781, nothing will ever get invented.
Re:Awe Man! (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not sure that it was a good idea even in 1781.
Basically, the mercantile class wrote the constitution and early laws. The American Revolution was a mercantile uprising against the "tyranny" of England and it's taxes and regulations.
Today, of course, the mercantile "class" are the corporations who have completely captured the government.
Numerous studies have demonstrated that patents slow the process of invention and only provide benefits for the entrenched last generation of science and technology.
Re:Awe Man! (Get your year right!) (Score:3)
The first patent act was in 1790. The Constitution only permitted Congress to have patents. Congress had to decide to do it.
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It's a bit trendy to hang the open source label on it, but that's TED for ya ... still there are differences between what was possible in the old days and what is possible now.
Publishing reproducible research wasn't really possible in the past ... other researchers could beg for all the lab notes, good description of the lab set up etc etc etc to be send by snail mail, but it couldn't really be published. Only the tiny and most of the time insufficient bit of information from the paper was actually publishe
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Re:Awe Man! (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the people working the fields grow the food and the people driving the trucks and manning the cash register distribute it. And even the organizational work is mostly done by middle managers. All the billionaires do is get a cut of other people's work and occasionally destroy their livelihoods.
And you think it takes a billionaire to write a book or a song?
And if you give him a billion dollars, all he will see are the serfs he's entitled to.
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The corporations own the farms. The actual workers are the farmers. The corporations collect a cut of the productivity generated by the farmers, but the productivity doesn't actually come from them.
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Except we've run the experiment already where ideas can be stolen and used without paying the author for these virtual property rights. Measured results are far suboptimal compared to the current way.
The OP is just an anecdote, and anybody with an ounce of scientific sense will realize it.
It would be nice if these things could be presented as scientific advancements without trumpeting it through the lens of someone's political philosophy.
Summary's not correctly worded (Score:2)
Researchers from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have made a fundamental discovery relevant to the understanding and treatment of heart failure
It does not say "prevent" heart-failure, anywhere in the article. It is implied in the article that treatment could be greatly improved by this therapy, however, I'm not sure where the line in the summary about prevention comes from.
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Cell (Score:2)
it's not linked to an actual scientific article
The transcript of the TED talk mentions articles in Cell.
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Animal Studies & then years of human trials (Score:2)
It sounds promising, but there is a lot of work ahead before it hits the market, if ever. Dosing, administration mode, side effects, when it can be used, what other drugs it will interact with and which it won't are all a part of what needs to be determined. The "drug" may have been discovered, but is really just a tiny part of what needs to be known before you can safely prescribe the use in people under all the varying conditions of use where it might be needed.
Thus, just because the molecule is "open s
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Even there, the open source nature is helpful. The same drug has stirred interest for multiple myeloma, heart failure, contraception [cell.com], and HIV treatment [oxfordjournals.org] (it is thought that it can activate latent HIV in the presence of anti-viral therapy to wipe out the reservoir). All 4 could share the phase I safety trial (and it's costs).
Re:Animal Studies & then years of human trials (Score:4, Informative)
Is it going to help or hurt?
Yes, it's created a lot of interest but that's pretty standard for a molecule that hits a relatively unique molecular pathway. What has happened in the past is that as soon as the basic science gets firmed up, the drug companies wander it and start trailing slightly different molecules (which are patentable). That's where the big money goes.
By explicitly opening up access to the molecule early, you might find more applications faster and perhaps get more people working on the same receptor system, but the end result is that the drug that treats multiple myeloma will look slightly different from the one that treats heart failure or is used as a male contraceptive. The drug makers will work hard to make them as task specific as possible so they can charge more and control things better. The only possible 'good' outcome (for the open source concept here) would be that the 'generic' bromodomain receptor blocker (JQ1) works equally well for all, doesn't do anything bad in humans (an unlikely scenario - most promising drug candidates die here along with countless dogs, monkeys and other critters) and can be reasonably easily synthesized by the Indian and Chinese generic drug manufacturers and they make a shitload of it.
Which will get blocked at the border so save us from commie chemicals.
Grump again.
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A back handed benefit is if the rest of the world considers those conditions a thing of the past while Americans are still dying of them. That would certainly bring demands for change that couldn't be fended off for long.
I do find it interesting that the free trade cheerleaders in DC stop cheering when retired people want to freely buy inexpensive prescription drugs from Canada.
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It seems to take a lot more than having a great new product to get it into public use to any great degree. For example the US Navy released Nitinol about 30 years back so that anyone can use it without patents. Despite being an amazing and wonderful product it sees very little use in the market place. We have some expensive eyeglass frames made of it and also some bras use memory metal to restore their shape every time they hit how water. But really we don't see it used much at all. How about car fe
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I never said that. However, whichever of those it is used for, the other known effects could well be acceptable to the patient.
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Well Duh: Open Source is better (Score:3)
The only thing drug patents do is make drug companies rich. If we as a nation (USAians here) truly wanted to maximize progress in medical treatment, we'd nationalize all drug research. Don't even bother arguing that profit motivates progress. The overwhelming majority of researchers and engineers are motivated by the joy of success, not crushing the opposition and getting filthy rich.
As we've seen over and over again in nearly every technology area, the greatest progress occurs either in "open source" areas or when patents expire and everyone can innovate.
(Yes, I'm a socialist. No, I don't think that in any way invalidates the fundamental claims I'm making here.)
don't prematurely ejaculate (Score:2)
the drug in the article has been proven to do exactly nothing.
no trials yet.
put it back in your pants.
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You didn't read a word of what I wrote, did you.
No comfy chair or chocolate for you.
Molpy down.
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I did read it. please provide a single instance where "open source" has created a medicine to cure disease
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average life expectancy in cuba is greater than the USA, infant mortality rate less than USA and only 1/6 the rate of AIDS.
Re:Well Duh: Open Source is better (Score:5, Informative)
Don't even bother arguing that profit motivates progress. The overwhelming majority of researchers and engineers are motivated by the joy of success, not crushing the opposition and getting filthy rich.
The problem with drug development is that the huge majority of efforts end in failure, and depending on how far along the pipeline the drugs are, these failures can be painfully expensive. Truth is, it's not really all that difficult or costly to come up with a nanomolar inhibitor for some key regulatory protein involved in heart disease or cancer. But that doesn't mean you've cured the disease. You might synthesize a molecule that completely shuts down your target protein, and start doing in-vivo studies. Here's where the bad shit starts: maybe your compound can't get past the cell membrane. Or maybe it gets shunted to the liver and immediately degraded - unless it fucks up the liver, of course (which one of the major reasons for negative drug interactions, and why many medications have labels saying "do not consume alcohol"). Or let's say it gets to exactly where it needs to be, but it also binds with high affinity to seven other proteins, three of which we know nothing about, and all of these are essential for other processes. So you come in the next morning, and half of your test mice are belly-up, another quarter are bleeding rectally, and the remainder will promptly croak if you feed them Tylenol.
If you're really unlucky, your drug passes the animal models easily, and makes it into clinical trials with actual sick humans. If you're really, really unlucky, you make it all the way to Phase III trials, with thousands of patients, and only then do you discover that either a) your drug doesn't really work as well as it needs to, or b) a large fraction of patients manifest severe side effects over time, or c) both. At this point the cumulative expense of developing this candidate may be hundreds of millions of dollars. And companies fail at this stage all the time; it's always big news when this happens, and their market capitalization takes it in the ass.
Now, I don't feel terribly sympathetic for drug companies as a whole; they do some pretty sleazy shit, and have paid some well-deserved fines for their malfeasance. But I would find it incredibly depressing to sink years of my life (and millions of dollars of investor money) into a promising clinical candidate, only to have it fail just shy of the endpoint. I'm an academic scientist, and this is one of the reasons why I've stayed in academia so long, for all of its faults. I get paid less, but I don't have to devote myself to narrowly-scoped projects which have a depressingly high risk of failure. If I had to start doing drug discovery as part of some newly nationalized research plan, I would leave without hesitation. Sorry, but if you want me to spend my life doing something that mind-numbing and soul-crushing, you'd fucking better pay decently me for it. The overwhelming majority of people who know anything about drug discovery will tell you the same thing.
PS #1: Please, explain how the extraordinary improvement in computer hardware since WWII was encouraged by lack of patents. Another counter-example: genome sequencing technology has become orders of magnitude faster in the last dozen or so years. (No, I'm not arguing that we should patent everything; I'm still against patents on software and gene sequences.)
PS #2: Don't assume that scientists aren't motivated by crushing the opposition. That's part of the joy of success, and while we may not be doing it for the money, our egos are at least as big as everyone else's.
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PS #1: Please, explain how the extraordinary improvement in computer hardware since WWII was encouraged by lack of patents. Another counter-example: genome sequencing technology has become orders of magnitude faster in the last dozen or so years. (No, I'm not arguing that we should patent everything; I'm still against patents on software and gene sequences.)
PS #2: Don't assume that scientists aren't motivated by crushing the opposition. That's part of the joy of success, and while we may not be doing it for the money, our egos are at least as big as everyone else's.
Re #1: go back and read about the (then legal) reverse-engineering of the IBM BIOS, without which most of our current software and hardware wouldn't exist.
Re #2: Neither you nor I represent the median ego of "scientist" -- class humanoids. Sure, getting there first is more fun, but that sort of competition is rather different from locking down your knowledge so nobody can review your results, reproduce your results, or improve upon them.
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Yup - this is just discovery work. This kind of research often happens in university and other open settings.
The problem is that 95% of the cost comes in during the boring and expensive process of testing the drug.
That's a good FOSS analogy as well. Notice how few FOSS projects REALLY test their products? Now consider that testing a piece of software just consists of people or scripts spending a few hours rigorously exercising the software on commodity hardware. In the drug research world you have to ge
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Right now the NIH does the early research, but doesn't spend the boatload of money needed to actually test the stuff they come up with. They usually abandon research when it gets to the point where this article is at.
Not really - what actually happens is typically that the universities patent the discovery and license it to a company which performs the development work. Which does have an element of "socialize the risk, privatize the profits", except that the expense of the product development is typically
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Right now the NIH does the early research, but doesn't spend the boatload of money needed to actually test the stuff they come up with. They usually abandon research when it gets to the point where this article is at.
Not really - what actually happens is typically that the universities patent the discovery and license it to a company which performs the development work.
Really two ways of saying the same thing. I realize that university labs often patent the stuff they come up with (something I don't have a problem with - the part I don't like is that the license fees that result don't predominantly go to the US Government). The bottom line is that they don't spend the huge sums of money that happen after an initial lead is developed.
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Thanks a lot for this. Slashdot is full of very smart people who say, "I'm very smart, and I don't understand why it takes you so much time, effort, and money to do the thing that you do. Here, let me teach you your job." It's nice to have the occasional interjection from somebody who actually understands what's going on to explain at least a few of the complications glossed over in the process.
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I don't say that trial and error does not have some place in science, but everything medical science seems too much based on trying stuff and doing statistics than on understanding things first.
That's because we still understand shockingly little about biological systems - I think around half of human genes remain uncharacterized. This means that even if we can say with certainty that "mutated protein X causes disease Y", and therefore inhibiting the mutant protein is a promising approach to curing the dis
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The problem is the general rules underlying the systems don't point you at drugs that work, they just point you away from some of the ones that don't. Once you are at the level of drug design you are dealing with lots of specific cases that resulted from billions of years of evolutionary ad-hoc.
Reproducibility is currently a big movement in academic chemistry/biology labs, and on the Pharma end most discoveries like the one above die during target validation due to not being reproducible, not being reprodu
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The pure research is mostly done off of NIH or DOE grants. The only drug-money research is the attempt to add an extra protein here, or swap an atom there to make it patentable, and then get the analogue through human trials,
Drugs discovered using NIH or DOE grants are usually already patentable if they don't fail one of the other tests. But these only account for about 25% of new drugs; the remainder are genuinely discovered by drug companies. That doesn't mean that the drug companies don't benefit in ot
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Sounds insanely inefficient to me. Maybe there needs to be some competition to remove the inefficiencies. i.e. no, or at least highly restricted, patent monopolies.
I think you're missing the fundamental point of patents. If there is no temporary monopoly on a novel drug, what is to prevent a bunch of bottom-feeders from simply copying it and selling it at a tenth of the price? It's far easier to copy someone else than to come up with something genuinely new, especially with a product that's so ridiculous
Is another myth about to bite the dust? (Score:2)
For a long time, commercial activities have claimed that only through commercial enterprise could quality and value be achieved. This has been claimed of software for a long time as well as with other industries. Among these is the drug/pharmaceutical industry because only they can afford the R&D needed to make important things happen. (Conveniently we forget that many of the most important drugs predate the big pharma industry.)
With 3D printing edging into device manufacturing space, just about ever
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With 3D printing edging into device manufacturing space, just about everything is going to face free/public competition, not the least of which will be energy production. Big business with its dependency on having the public dependent on them has its days numbered. I look forward to those days... I wonder if I will live that long?
No you won't.
Because 3D printing isn't going to replace anything much beyond the utensil selection in Walmart for the foreseeable future. Hell, you'll be lucky if you can shoot yourself in head with a 3D printed object in your lifetime. You'd be most likely to blow up your hand and have to go the the hospital and get treated with stuff that's been woven, extruded, grown, spun or glued.
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Among these is the drug/pharmaceutical industry because only they can afford the R&D needed to make important things happen.
It's less the "R" than the "D". The government spends large amounts on basic research, including some expenses which drug companies, at least individually, can't afford. For instance, the US Department of Energy builds massive X-ray generators called synchrotrons, which are used by biologists to determine the structures of proteins, and drug companies make heavy use of these to i
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Well, first of all? Who are these commercial activities you speak of who supposedly claimed quality and value were ONLY achievable via commercial enterprise?
I can't think of a single business making that claim today? Clearly, technological progress means that ideas starting out as massive, costly endeavors become mundane with time. I remember when recordable CDR technology was brand new, for example. The only people possessing CD writer drives were generally government contractors and educational institut
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Among these is the drug/pharmaceutical industry because only they can afford the R&D needed to make important things happen.
They're not the only ones who can afford it, but right now they're about the only ones willing to spend it.
The research in this article did NOT develop a new drug. It only discovered a compound that has biological activity. That is the very first step in drug research, and usually it takes about 5 years and $100M to prove conclusively that it won't work in the real world. Maybe 5% of the time it will take 5 years and $100M to prove that it actually does work.
I'm all for expanding the publish research mod
you're doing it wrong (Score:2)
Collaboration and sharing results is standard in science and has been for the last few hundred years. Practically speaking, patents on their own are meaningless for new scientific advancements and do nothing to prevent or encourage scientific advancement. They're a non-issue. What does matter is how much it costs to read the published results.
The equivalent to open source in science is open access. CELL is not open access. As a result, I (as a scientist without access to CELL) don't have access to their
Link to parts of the paper: (Score:2)
What's claimed is pretty impressive. They say they've gotten 60% improvement in heart function from a month long treatment course in mice and even quicker protective effect against declines in function. The caveat, as always, is that many things work well in mice, but don't translate into human therapies.
This is still paywalled, but it has many of the figures from the article as well as the abstract.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867413008842 [sciencedirect.com]
This is of direct interest to me as I have
Long Odds (Score:2)
Let's see. This is a molecule in pre-clinical testing. I would give this specific molecule about a 1 in 1,000 chance of actually being marketed. Those are damn good odds for a molecule at this stage. This is why you always have to take the word "potential" with a boulder of salt.
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"Reproduce, then die, like nature intended."
Ok. You first.
But feel free to give up the reproduce part.
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What's the deal with all the crazy vegans around here lately? Go to your local hippie store and look at the vegans. Then go to your local CrossFit and look at the paleo eaters. Which group looks healthier to you?
Then go look at someone who eats a balanced diet including meat, dairy, grains, fruits and vegetables.
Extreme diets like Vegan and Paleo are unhealthy, even if they dont look it.
BTW, most gym junkies are steroid users. Your average healthy person does not look like that.
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Meatheads don't last long with CrossFit. It's a different animal, and I'd never describe some roided-up dude as healthy. And most people I know who eat grains are fat. I was when I did.
Go read Why We Get Fat by Gary Taubes, or Doug McGuff's Body by Science. Be sure to check out Robert Lustig's "Sugar: The Bitter Truth" on YouTube (or the UC site, if tha
Re:More pointless 'research' (Score:4, Informative)
Most heart disease is caused by eating animal products (which humans aren't supposed to eat), lack of exercise, and smoking.
That was considered very wise in 1982. Today we know that the main nutritional problem is excess fructose, which the liver turns straight into triglycerides, which stick to the arterial walls, and form nasty, sticky plaques. But go ahead and guzzle agave nectar - it's pure fructose, vegan, and trendy. :P
Exercise, sleep, low stress, and of course not smoking are also key components to a healthy lifestyle (diet is just one part).
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> Today we know that the main nutritional problem is excess fructose
As opposed to malnutrition from poverty? Think again.
As for nutrition causing heart disease, wait a few years. I'm afraid the cause will be "discovered" to be something else. The last few decades have seen the blame cast on smoking, excess preservatives, excess sucrose (not fructose!), excess protein, excess fat, excess trans-fatty acids, excess salt, excess liquor, excess body fat, excess work, excess processed food, excess caffeine, la
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The main risk from heart disease is genetic.
Although even that typically manifests only once a person has outlived their natural lifespan and are no longer able to breed and help perpetuate their family line.
Trying to maintain a lifestyle based on a cuisine that's not your own is a serious effort that can be easily f*cked up. Engaging in something that doesn't even have some cultural origin is just living of of some fad diet.
People in general are too stupid and aren't educated enough or aware enough of them
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> Today we know that the main nutritional problem is excess fructose
...
As for nutrition causing heart disease, wait a few years. I'm afraid the cause will be "discovered" to be something else.
To my knowledge, this is the only experiment that has shown direct observation: Differentiation of multipotent vascular stem cells contributes to vascular diseases [berkeley.edu]. I haven't followed the research lately, so this may have been debunked in the last year.
That said, every other article I have read on the subject seems like purely correlational bullshit.
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Most heart disease is caused by eating animal products (which humans aren't supposed to eat),
Depends on who's doing the supposing. Most humans suppose they will. And most scientists (all of those who aren't working from a religious or diet industry agenda) suppose humans are adapted to do so -- in some quantity or other.
...lack of exercise, and smoking.
Does this magic pill cure all of those too?
Most people want to have their cake and eat it too.
There's no meat, tobacco or lack of exercise in cake. But you forgot to mention gluten. As many a 1% of people might have trouble with cake.
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Heart disease is a natural degradation of the body, but is accelerated by diet and lack o
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Inuit aren't human?
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> Most heart disease is caused by eating animal products (which humans aren't supposed to eat),
You are not a cow. No matter how much you would like this to be the, case it simply is not true. If you try and pretend that you are a cow then you will DIE.
We are omnivores.
Being able to (mostly) eat what happens to be available is one of our key adaptive advantages and a key reason you even exist at all.
Opportunitistic carnivores are the only reason you're here to spout your political nonsense.
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"Most heart disease is caused by eating animal products (which humans aren't supposed to eat), lack of exercise, and smoking."
Some of it. I'd also change that to eating too much in general.
Of course, I've yet to hear of a nonsmoking vegan runner that's survived to tell us of, say, the Civil War. So, there's a pretty strong limit on the amount of benefit.
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A cake made without eggs or butter? Who in their right mind would eat such an abomination?
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I was wondering how long a drug patent lasts right now and if it is tied at all to how long it took to research whatever the drug patent is for?
Drug patent's don't expire anymore, and if a generic is available they are able to restrict it's purchase in the US.
Modafinal is the generic name and can't be purchase in the US, Provigil is the brand name and was due
to lose it's patent in 2012. Nuvigil was released at that time and I can't find a reason but the patent has
been extended to Provigil to some time in the far future
Modafinal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modafinil [wikipedia.org] > Provigil >
Nuvigil http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armodafinil [wikipedia.org] generic is Armo