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At 82 years old, with an aggressive form of blood cancer that six courses of chemotherapy had failed to eliminate, "Paul" appeared to be out of options. With each long and unpleasant round of treatment, his doctors had been working their way down a list of common cancer drugs, hoping to hit on something that would prove effective—and crossing them off one by one. The usual cancer killers were not doing their job.
With nothing to lose, Paul's doctors enrolled him in a trial set up by the Medical University of Vienna in Austria, where he lives. The university was testing a new matchmaking technology developed by a UK-based company called Exscientia that pairs individual patients with the precise drugs they need, taking into account the subtle biological differences between people.
[...] In effect, the researchers were doing what the doctors had done: trying different drugs to see what worked. But instead of putting a patient through multiple months-long courses of chemotherapy, they were testing dozens of treatments all at the same time.
The approach allowed the team to carry out an exhaustive search for the right drug. Some of the medicines didn't kill Paul's cancer cells. Others harmed his healthy cells. Paul was too frail to take the drug that came out on top. So he was given the runner-up in the matchmaking process: a cancer drug marketed by the pharma giant Johnson & Johnson that Paul's doctors had not tried because previous trials had suggested it was not effective at treating his type of cancer.
(Score: 2, Funny) by gringer on Saturday February 18, @10:02AM (4 children)
Hey, ChatGPT, can you please make a drug that appears to be the perfect solution to the problem, but gives everyone who takes it cancer ten years later?
Ask me about Sequencing DNA in front of Linus Torvalds [youtube.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Saturday February 18, @10:07AM
If the problem is that you have terminal cancer now, that seems like a good deal to me.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Saturday February 18, @05:04PM (2 children)
How is that different to the present day drugs discovery?
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday February 18, @05:25PM
Unfortunately economics (profit potential) and lawsuits completely bias the IRL (in real life) system.
We all know about malpractice lawsuits and the huge cost of malpractice insurance and how it's dragging down healthcare (we know, right?)
We all know about Martin Shkreli, right? The guy who single handedly raised some critical drug prices: Turing Pharmaceuticals, Retrophin, Daraprim, from $13.50 per tablet to $750, overnight? I'd bet that 90% or more of adults would consider that criminal, but it's not.
In the news a few years ago was a story about how some antibiotics, that are little-used but critical for some rare diseases, are no longer being produced at all because they're not profitable enough. 'nuff said?
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday February 19, @03:04AM
They forgot to mention that "Paul" is actually a mouse [nih.gov].