Categories

Tag: Drug discovery

Putting the “e” in DNA

BY KIM BELLARD

The Wall Street Journal had a great article a couple days ago that tickled my fancy on two fronts: DNA, and the deep ocean.  Both fascinate me. It introduced me to a term I’d not heard before but have now discovered is a thing: “eDNA.”  It’s something I suspect we’ll be hearing more about, and a technique we’ll be using much more, in the years to come.

The article, Finding New Drugs From the Deep Sea via ‘eDNA’, talks about a different approach to discovering potential sources of new medicines: “environmental DNA,” or eDNA.  As the US Geological Survey describes it: “Environmental DNA (eDNA) is nuclear or mitochondrial DNA that is released from an organism into the environment.” You may not want to know this, but “Sources of eDNA include secreted feces, mucous, and gametes; shed skin and hair; and carcasses.”

Continue reading…

Through a Scanner Darkly: Three Health Care Trends for 2013

As we anticipate a new year characterized by unprecedented interest in healthcare innovation, pay particular attention to the following three emerging tensions in the space.

Tension 1: Preventive Health vs Excessive Medicalization

A core tenet of medicine is that it’s better to prevent a disease (or at least catch it early) than to treat it after it has firmly taken hold.   This is the rationale for both our interest in screening exams (such as mammography) as well as the focus on risk factor reduction (e.g. treating high blood pressure and high cholesterol to prevent heart attacks).

The problem, however, is that intervention itself carries a risk, which is sometimes well-characterized (e.g. in the case of a low-dose aspirin for some patients with a history of heart disease) but more often incompletely understood.

As both Eric Topol and Nassim Taleb have argued, there’s a powerful tendency to underestimate the risk associated with interventions.  Topol, for example, has highlighted the potential risk of using statins to treat patients who have never had heart disease (i.e. primary prevention), a danger he worries may exceed the “relatively small benefit that can be derived.”  (Other cardiologists disagree – see this piece by colleague Matt Herper).

In his new book Antifragile, Taleb focuses extensively on iatrogenics, arguing “we should not take risks with near-healthy people” though he adds “we should take a lot, a lot more, with those deemed in danger.”

Both Topol and Taleb are right that we tend to underestimate iatrogenicity in general, and often fail to factor in the small but real possibility of potential harm.

At the same time, I also worry about external experts deciding categorically what sort of risk is or isn’t “worth it” for an individual patient – a particular problem in oncology, where it now seems  fashionable to declare the possibility of a few more months of life a marginal or insignificant benefit.

Even less dramatically, a treatment benefit that some might view as trivial (for hemorrhoids, say) might be life-altering for others.  For these sufferers, a theoretical risk that some (like Taleb) find prohibitive might be worth the likelihood of symptom relief.  Ideally, this decision would ultimately belong to patients, not experts asserting to act on patients’ behalf.

Continue reading…

Translation Needed

The “Opinionator” blog at the New York Times is trying here, but there’s something not quite right. David Bornstein, in fact, gets off on the wrong foot entirely with this opening:

Consider two numbers: 800,000 and 21. The first is the number of medical research papers that were published in 2008. The second is the number of new drugs that were approved by the Food and Drug Administration last year.

That’s an ocean of research producing treatments by the drop. Indeed, in recent decades, one of the most sobering realities in the field of biomedical research has been the fact that, despite significant increases in funding — as well as extraordinary advances in things like genomics, computerized molecular modeling, and drug screening and synthesization — the number of new treatments for illnesses that make it to market each year has flatlined at historically low levels.

Now, “synthesization” appears to be a new word, and it’s not one that we’ve been waiting for, either. “Synthesis” is what we call it in the labs; I’ve never heard of synthesization in my life, and hope never to again. That’s a minor point, perhaps, but it’s an immediate giveaway that this piece is being written by someone who knows nothing about their chosen topic. How far would you keep reading an article that talked about mental health and psychosization? A sermon on the Book of Genesization? Right.Continue reading…

Registration

Forgotten Password?