This is great news! I hope this research gets more funding. It could open a lot of doors and save many lives. I'm sorry you have to see Alzheimers up close. Hopefully, this study is the beginning of something great. I do hope if this ends up being IT, pharmaceutical companies don't attempt to burn through people's pockets.
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Thanks. Yeah unfortunately pharma is a for profit business, it's just the nature of capitalism to maximize those profits. Would be nice if we could not do that, but rather just charge a reasonable amount to recoup investment and research costs and turn a small profit. However greed does seem to drive the world...
Sad but true. Sometimes I wonder if it's the reason why cancer treatment research only start at "promising" for years on end and never progress to anything more. Curing cancer or any expensive disorder is like saying bye bye to big cash.
Usually not. A lot of promising work doesn't carry over to humans. The reason for this is the vastly differing metabolic enzymes found in us versus other test model animals. So say you have this treatment that looks super promising in a mouse model like this one. For it to be effective you need to establish a working dose concentration of the compound you are using which achieves the desirable effect while minimizes off target effects. Okay having established this in your model you go to try to use it in humans.
A clinical trial begins. You dose people with your drug and... Nothing happens. So you try to titrate the dose up. Nothing happens nothing happens you in crease further... Uh oh, weird side effects happen.
They aren't a problem though, and the desired effect is starting to happen (say a tumor has slowed it's growth for a cancer drug). But it's not enough, for a drug it needs to be superior to current treatments or nobody will use it. So you keep going with trials, upping dosing trying to see what you saw in the model system.
But many times it doesn't happen, side effects get to be too bad, or someone dies in a trial FROM the drug, all because human metabolism is just different. Our livers break drugs down, or modify them in ways which change how they work.
I used to think pharma was withholding drugs (and maybe some do) until I started working for one doing drug discovery. Now I've found that... It's just really hard.
Thanks for answering that especially in a detailed manner. I'm now utterly curious about your work. I hope breakthroughs in a lot of disorders would happen soon but I suppose it's asking for too much. In any case, I'm still hoping for the best. Thank you for sharing your knowledge.
Sure, you're welcome. :)