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Natural occurring molecule rivals Ozempic in weight loss, sidesteps side effects

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Re: Natural occurring molecule rivals Ozempic in weight loss, sidesteps side effects

#321

Post by rstuart4133 »

sumtechguy wrote: post #99
mkoubaa wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beautiful yet terrifying. I'm glad that regex isn't something I'll ever have to touch.

I think it comes down to the syntax being used to make regex. It is borderline an assembly language level of making them. Better language tools would make it easier for people to grok. Basically instead of using chars like ?^()$ and the like lets use words people understand.

As @aranchelk said LL and LR grammars are literally that. They allow you to assign names to regexs and compose them.

Libraries like python's lrparsing [0] let you assign regex's (aka tokens) to variables, then build grammars by combining them using python expressions. For example:

    while_statement = Keyword('while') + '(' + expression + ')' + block
    statement = while_statement | ....
    block = Token('{') + Repeat(statement + ';') + Token('}')
These grammars are more complex, with more rules you have to follow, but also more checking is done when they are compiled. They tend to mostly work once they do compile. So they are what you asked for, but there is no free lunch.

On the down side, lrparsing is pure python so it's slower than python's inbuilt regex's.

[0] https://lrparsing.sourceforge.net/

Re: Natural occurring molecule rivals Ozempic in weight loss, sidesteps side effects

#323

Post by throwup238 »

greggsy wrote: post #297
throwup238 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not exactly true. Cannabidiol (CBD) is naturally occurring and there’s a commercial FDA approved drug for epileptic seizures in children called Epidiolex. If I remember correctly, the patent is for “Oral cannabinoid formulations”. Even without a patent, companies can get FDA exclusivity but for not as long as a patent grants them so unless the addressable market is huge, it’s a financially riskier bet.

Keyword there being ‘formulation’, not ‘molecule’

A “formulation” is a “molecule” at a specific concentration, in a specific solvent, etc. The patent is still on using CBD.

Re: Natural occurring molecule rivals Ozempic in weight loss, sidesteps side effects

#324

Post by tasty_freeze »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #317

Since it is a natural occurring molecule, and given this report detailing it, does it mean that production could be cheap and easy?

I know nothing about the topic, but I do know that insulin is a naturally occurring molecule but it wasn't a slam dunk. For years it was extracted from pig and cow pancreases collected from slaughterhouses and fed into a blender, but it required a lot of development to filter out the non-insulin molecules. In fact, some people would eventually develop allergies to their animal-derived insulin due to the trace amounts of other proteins that would slip through.

One of the first targets of genetic engineering in the mid 70s was putting a human insulin gene into e coli (I think yeast was tried too). But it isn't that easy -- the e coli genome needed other changes to prevent the e coli from degrading the molecule, as it was a waste product as far as the e coli was concerned. It took until 82 or so before that was viable.

But that isn't the end of it. The insulin generated is not active -- it needs to be cleaved from the "cluster" that the generated molecule into individual active insulin proteins. That naturally takes a few hours, which isn't great for diabetics because they need to anticipate their need hours ahead and if they overshoot they can go into a coma, and if they undershoot it takes hours to correct it.

It took years to design "fast insulin" which can be absorbed in under half an hour.

I know all this only because the most recent "Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe" episode:

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-daniel-and-kellys-extraor...

Re: Natural occurring molecule rivals Ozempic in weight loss, sidesteps side effects

#325

Post by dTal »

Centigonal wrote: post #246
throwup238 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Caffeine is grandfathered in as a Generally Recognized as Safe food additive. If energy drink companies had to go through clinical trials with no patent protection for each drink formula, they wouldn't make them.

I think the current regulatory regime in many US states allows companies to make a killing off of selling naturally occurring bioactive substances as dietary supplements with few regulatory hurdles. Kratom, CBD, and delta-8 THC are naturally occurring bioactive substances that are newer to the US market. Both have carved out a pretty nice economic niche with a bunch of claimed health benefits. A couple of years back,…

Your point is a bit undermined by the fact that two out of your three examples are cannabis extracts, where cannabis proper - literally a leaf - is still very much illegal and has to be "laundered" through chemical processes to make it less fun and therefore "medicine" instead of "recreational drugs".

Re: Natural occurring molecule rivals Ozempic in weight loss, sidesteps side effects

#326

Post by stavros »

IshKebab wrote: post #309
n4r9 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then they have "too much muscle" as typically needed for their body mass It's a leap to suggest that it's "good" to lose this muscle mass. If you're obese then it's good to lose fat. It's even better to do so while maintaining muscle mass.

Yeah that's obviously better. They really meant it's "not bad" rather than "good". When people read "muscle loss" they think "oh it's going to make me weak and feeble".

Well, no, but I like how muscular I look (even with the extra weight). I wouldn't want to look skinny and lose the weight lifting gains.

Re: Natural occurring molecule rivals Ozempic in weight loss, sidesteps side effects

#327

Post by Mr_Minderbinder »

sn9 wrote: post #256
tromp wrote: post #3

If this really has the potential to compete with Ozempic, then it should have a noticeable impact on Novo Nordisk's stock value [1], but we're not seeing that yet. [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NVO/

This assumes that NN won't snap it up themselves.

Indeed, if this becomes a threat I fully expect one of either Novo Nordisk or Eli Lilly to buy them out.

Re: Natural occurring molecule rivals Ozempic in weight loss, sidesteps side effects

#328

Post by Centigonal »

dTal wrote: post #325
Centigonal wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the current regulatory regime in many US states allows companies to make a killing off of selling naturally occurring bioactive substances as dietary supplements with few regulatory hurdles. Kratom, CBD, and delta-8 THC are naturally occurring bioactive substances that are newer to the US market. Both have carved out a pretty nice economic niche with a bunch of claimed health benefits. A couple of years back,…

Your point is a bit undermined by the fact that two out of your three examples are cannabis extracts, where cannabis proper - literally a leaf - is still very much illegal and has to be "laundered" through chemical processes to make it less fun and therefore "medicine" instead of "recreational drugs".

I think your point and mine can both be true at the same time. Cannabis is the subject of a past regulatory regime that restricted nearly all psychoactive substances popular at the time (natural or synthetic). The actions of that regime do not go away when the zeitgeist changes. The current regulatory regime is much more dovish, and that is visible in the difference between the controlled status of chemicals that became popular recently versus similar ones that were popular 50 years ago.

Re: Natural occurring molecule rivals Ozempic in weight loss, sidesteps side effects

#329

Post by wiml »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #314
Der_Einzige wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this not more well known? I thought I was a god for discovering dir() but you’re showing that I was nothing but a peon!!!

There's a bunch of "all dunder properties" pages online, any one of them is well worth reading through at least once. So much hidden goodness.

The actual docs on python.org are quite readable and probably a lot more accurate than random blogspam / LLM glurge pages

Re: Natural occurring molecule rivals Ozempic in weight loss, sidesteps side effects

#330

Post by TheRealPomax »

Wilduck wrote: post #187
TheRealPomax wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Function documentation goes inside functions in Python, explicitly making them self-documenting. That can then be automatically picked up by any other code (like tooling for automatically generating API documentation) formalized as PEP 257, https://peps.python.org/pep-0257 Python will literally assign the content of your docstring (a triple-quoted string at the start of a function) to a special double underscored ("d…

> type `print(function_name.__doc__)` Or even easier: `help(function_name)`!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43266546 just got posted about that =D
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