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Three young scientists thing they have a way to defeat antibiotic resistance:
Three college-age scientists think they know how to solve a huge problem facing medicine. They think they've found a way to overcome antibiotic resistance. Many of the most powerful antibiotics have lost their efficacy against dangerous bacteria, so finding new antibiotics is a priority. It's too soon to say for sure if the young researchers are right, but if gumption and enthusiasm count for anything, they stand a fighting chance.
[...] Last October, Stanford launched a competition for students interested in developing solutions for big problems in health care. Not just theoretical solutions, but practical, patentable solutions that could lead to real products. The three young scientists thought they had figured out a way to make a set of proteins that would kill antibiotic resistant bacteria. They convinced a jury of Stanford faculty, biotech types and investors that they were onto something, and got $10,000 to develop their idea.
[...] "The way that our proteins operate, that if the bacteria evolve resistance to them, actually the bacteria can no longer live anymore," says Rosenthal. "We target something that's essential to bacterial survival." Bacteria have managed to evolve a way around even the most sophisticated attempts to kill them, so I was curious to know more about how the proteins these young inventors say they've found worked. "We're not able to disclose, unfortunately," says Filsinger Interrante. It's their intellectual property, she explains, that they hope will attract investors. "We think that our protein has the potential to target very dangerous, multidrug-resistant bacteria."
Peer review, meet news review.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Wednesday August 10 2016, @11:34AM
The U.S. is a capitalist society with for profit health care.
Which is a really big part of the problem.
Basically, can you blame them for wanting their slice of what could solve one of medicine's biggest problem?
Yes.
Are all of you haters saying they should just give it out to current companies to make bazillions while they get nothing?
No, I'm saying they should just publish so that anybody could manufacture it.
If the U.S. wasn't a capitalist society...
The world wouldn't be stuck with GigaPharmaCorp an all the associated problems.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 10 2016, @01:14PM
Why would they do that when they could patent it, then license it for manufacture to multiple companies? Then they could get rich AND keep prices down through market competition. Another thought, publish and patent aren't mutually exclusive. They could publish the research AND apply for a patent.
Pats on the back and having something named after you doesn't put food on the table. How do you propose they should be rewarded for their innovation? So world changing innovation deserves no reward, but simply having means deserves millions (billions?) simply by having said means? By them giving it away, they would be handing GigaPharmaCorps profits with nothing in return. Even if a drug comes out of this that is quite expensive, it is still better than having no drug at all.
(Score: 2) by hash14 on Wednesday August 10 2016, @10:10PM
How do you propose they should be rewarded for their innovation?
Doing a good thing for society is reward enough. If it isn't, then we'll just have to get by without your contributions.
As long as the creators are able to have a reasonable living (and if they're working for Stanford, then they sure as hell are), then any profiteering over the top at society's expense is nothing more than exploiting other people's misfortune and misery.
(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Wednesday August 10 2016, @11:45PM
No, I'm saying they should just publish so that anybody could manufacture it.
Why would they do that when they could patent it, then license it for manufacture to multiple companies?
Because that's not the purpose of research?
Another thought, publish and patent aren't mutually exclusive. They could publish the research AND apply for a patent.
Actually, they are. The point of publishing is to make the knowlege available to everybody.
Pats on the back and having something named after you doesn't put food on the table. How do you propose they should be rewarded for their innovation?
Pats on the back and having something named after you = more job opportunities, which do put food on the table.
By them giving it away, they would be handing GigaPharmaCorps profits with nothing in return.
And as well as GigaPharmaCorp, NanoPharm also gets to manufacture it.
Even if a drug comes out of this that is quite expensive, it is still better than having no drug at all.
"No drug at all" isn't going to happen. If the drug's expensive to manufacture it will be expensive to buy (whether by the patient or the government via a civilised subsidy scheme). But letting anybody make it will lower costs (is GigaPharmaCorp really afraid of competition from some little guy?).
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by SecurityGuy on Wednesday August 10 2016, @01:15PM
Nobody's going to manufacture it. It hasn't been through clinical trials yet.
I've been involved in research, including animal and clinical trials. A *lot* of promising compounds never make it to clinical trials. Some that do don't make it through, either because they turn out not to work in humans, are toxic, etc. I don't have data on how many get to clinical trials but are never approved for use.
This article is written like they've solved the problem and are sitting on a gold mine. In all likelihood, they aren't. Good for them (and us) if they are, but they've proven exactly nothing. They won a local competition. That's all.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 10 2016, @04:27PM
The days of drugs being manufactured exclusively by big corps are coming to an end. New technologies will allow many drugs (not just meth) and biologics to be manufactured by one machine in the garage.
(Score: 2) by SecurityGuy on Wednesday August 10 2016, @05:47PM
Old technologies allow drugs to be manufactured in the garage. Compounds that are tested now aren't necessarily manufactured by big pharmaceutical corporations. The point remains that we have no reason to believe this protein actually does anything yet, or that if it does anything in a petri dish, it would actually work in a human, or if it actually works in a human, that it wouldn't have other negative effects that make it not therapeutically viable.
I'm not against stuff like this, I've just seen it before. A friend died of cancer ~17 years ago and right after a breakthrough treatment was discovered by a researcher I'd followed for years (I was in cancer research at the time). Oh, the terrible timing of it all. Except that it turned out the treatment didn't really work in people. Even if it had been discovered before she was diagnosed, it was irrelevant. It didn't work.
The time to get excited about this is when it makes it through a successful clinical trial. Until then, they're college kids who have an idea good enough to win a small competition, but won't release any data so anybody else can even begin to meaningfully speculate if there's anything at all here. Stuff like that happens all the time.
An MD/Ph.D. friend of mine likes to say that it's nice that compound X kills cancer in a petri dish...but so does a handgun.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Wednesday August 10 2016, @09:22PM
The days of drugs being manufactured exclusively by big corps are coming to an end. New technologies will allow many drugs (not just meth) and biologics to be manufactured by one machine in the garage.
Maybe on both of these statements, but the cynic in me knows that big corps tend to respond to either of these sort of threats by buying legislation putting a stop to them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 11 2016, @02:15AM
vote with your feet.
Governments only work if they have enough money and manpower to operate. Take away enough of either and they will collapse until their own weight.