21–30 of 52 posts
1) Metabolic side effects tend to be slow and subtle. Vioxx caused increased heart attacks over time. Passing a phase 1 safety trial is fine and dandy, but it’s a far cry short of long-term safety in a drug targeting metabolism, and it’s not even where most drugs fail. 2) Lab evidence for a biomarker for a metabolic process is so far short of evidence of clinical improvement that it’s a joke. I will never stop deridi…
Do all "we have identified a dose range that doesn’t immediately sicken people” studies make it to Nature journals ?
Nature Endocrinology Reviews is a relatively ranking journal in endocrinology - roughly second place, by impact factor. This didn’t get published there.
Nature Metabolism was only opened in 2017, as an online-only journal. It doesn’t even rank in the top 50 for endocrine and metabolism journals - granted, that may be in part because it doesn’t even have an impact factor yet (calculating impact factor requires two years of publication history preceding the year being calculated for. In 2020, we should see a 2019 IF.)
So, one can say they might be enormously prestigious, and we just won’t see until 2020. It’s more likely that people aren’t bothering publishing their best articles in a 0 IF journal, because in academic circles the Nature Subbrand is recognized as not inherently meaningful, so the 0 IF pub just hurts (unless you think your pub would otherwise end up in an unimpressive journal, and you want to gamble that the future IF will be higher and pay off.)
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...or we could just start eating Pomegranates?
If they’ve raised capital for a series of clinical trials, you can reasonably assume the doses at which they expect to see clinical effects are much higher than you’re likely to get just from food ingestion - otherwise their competition would just be pomegranate juice pills or something, sold as a food supplement and requiring no trials of safety or efficacy. They’d never have been able to raise a cent. In other word…
What criterion does the FDA use to distinguish a food-derived chemical that needs to be treated as a drug, from one that’s still just seen as an extract/essence of the food itself, and therefore can be treated as a supplement? It seems very opaque to me.
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That seems overly dismissive of the finding on mitochondrial activity: " The team then assessed the efficacy of UA by looking at cellular and mitochondrial health biomarkers in the participants' blood and muscle tissue. The results were compelling: UA stimulates mitochondrial biogenesis—the process by which cells increase mitochondrial mass—in the same way as regular exercise. UA is the only known compound that re-es…
Biomarkers are not a clinical effect, this doesn't tell you whether this compound has any anti-aging effects. This is still an early point in the development of a drug.
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Phase 1 study. Years from market.
...or we could just start eating Pomegranates?
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Biomarkers are not a clinical effect, this doesn't tell you whether this compound has any anti-aging effects. This is still an early point in the development of a drug.
What particular anti-aging effects do you regard? Are not improvements in mitochondrial health practical indicators of anti-aging as improvements in skin elasticity or bone strength?
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Biomarkers are not a clinical effect, this doesn't tell you whether this compound has any anti-aging effects. This is still an early point in the development of a drug.
Exactly. Promising biology != clinical activity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Biomarkers are not a clinical effect, this doesn't tell you whether this compound has any anti-aging effects. This is still an early point in the development of a drug.
What particular anti-aging effects do you regard? Are not improvements in mitochondrial health practical indicators of anti-aging as improvements in skin elasticity or bone strength?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That seems overly dismissive of the finding on mitochondrial activity: " The team then assessed the efficacy of UA by looking at cellular and mitochondrial health biomarkers in the participants' blood and muscle tissue. The results were compelling: UA stimulates mitochondrial biogenesis—the process by which cells increase mitochondrial mass—in the same way as regular exercise. UA is the only known compound that re-es…
Biomarkers are not a clinical effect, this doesn't tell you whether this compound has any anti-aging effects. This is still an early point in the development of a drug.