WWTBAM Bored

Fires the imagination.

Thanks for posting this. I have sent it to a friend with particular interest in the topic.

This is hope-inspiring....fantastic to see such leaps in the research.

Clinical trials of this will prove to be an ethical challenge.

I certainly hope this comes to be.

It would be awesome news.

Thanks 5LD.

Jeemie wrote:Clinical trials of this will prove to be an ethical challenge.

How so?

Jeemie wrote:Clinical trials of this will prove to be an ethical challenge.

Why?

When you do clinical trials, you must have a control group who gets the placebo, to measure if the treatment works.

If the treatment proves to work, members of the control group usually get the treatment, but for something like this it could be too late.

Same as with any life-threatening disease and a new treatment. Finding patients who haven't been on any other drug (so as not to skew the data potentially), and then giving half of them a placebo (so they effectively have no treatment at all). The company will jump in, stop the study (with FDA approval) and give everyone the drug in extreme cases where the difference between drug and placebo becomes obvious, but in the meantime, you've got untreated sick people.

Depending on how the early phase clinicals are designed, though, and of course the efficacy of the drug, the normal phase 3 double-blind might be bypassed in a case like this. Seems like a good idea, but I'm curious how they seem so certain that the particular stretch of virus does not mutate.

medical science is a fascinating, scary, intriguing, amazing thing.

t.

This would be a very very very good thing.

And I wonder if other rapidly mutating viruses, like the flu, which occasionally sports lethal variants (think "bird flu"), have vulnerable non-variant genetic regions that would also be susceptible to such treatment (with, of course, an abzyme, another word I've never heard before, specific to them).

gsabc wrote:Same as with any life-threatening disease and a new treatment. Finding patients who haven't been on any other drug (so as not to skew the data potentially), and then giving half of them a placebo (so they effectively have no treatment at all). The company will jump in, stop the study (with FDA approval) and give everyone the drug in extreme cases where the difference between drug and placebo becomes obvious, but in the meantime, you've got untreated sick people.

Depending on how the early phase clinicals are designed, though, and of course the efficacy of the drug, the normal phase 3 double-blind might be bypassed in a case like this. Seems like a good idea, but I'm curious how they seem so certain that the particular stretch of virus does not mutate.

This why I ask Jeemie what he meant. As a fellow scientist he should understand how these trials work.