It's interesting to me that people are working on a cure for Ebola yet no one is deeply interested in working on new antibiotics. Ebola is a scary disease yet rare (across the entire planet) so there doesn't seem to be a lot of monetary reason to invest in it. Antibiotic resistance is far more widespread. I guess I don't always understand how the pharmaceutical industry decides what to look at.
Ebola: Experimental drug ZMapp is '100% effective' in animal trials
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Re: Ebola: Experimental drug ZMapp is '100% effective' in animal trials
#12It's interesting to me that people are working on a cure for Ebola yet no one is deeply interested in working on new antibiotics. Ebola is a scary disease yet rare (across the entire planet) so there doesn't seem to be a lot of monetary reason to invest in it. Antibiotic resistance is far more widespread. I guess I don't always understand how the pharmaceutical industry decides what to look at.
I don't know if Ebola qualifies, but there are 'orphan drug' laws in many places that help pay for the development of medicine to treat rare diseases or conditions.
Re: Ebola: Experimental drug ZMapp is '100% effective' in animal trials
#13It's interesting to me that people are working on a cure for Ebola yet no one is deeply interested in working on new antibiotics. Ebola is a scary disease yet rare (across the entire planet) so there doesn't seem to be a lot of monetary reason to invest in it. Antibiotic resistance is far more widespread. I guess I don't always understand how the pharmaceutical industry decides what to look at.
> Ebola is a scary disease yet rare (across the entire planet) so there doesn't seem to be a lot of monetary reason to invest in it. Antibiotic resistance is far more widespread.
All true, but once one understands the microbiology, it becomes obvious why drug companies are giving up on antibiotics. It's perfectly rational behavior -- no matter what antibiotics we invent, the microbes will evolve resistance to them in a short time. That's been the history of antibiotics until now, and there's no reason to expect the future to be any different -- if anything, it will probably become worse.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/health-science-techn...
Title: "Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached 'The End of Antibiotics, Period'"
Re: Ebola: Experimental drug ZMapp is '100% effective' in animal trials
#14why we still test effectiveness on animals when there are several thousands of people who has no downside and only upside for the drug to be tested on them? Ethics? It would be a strange ethics that had worked only until an American needed the cure. Something isn't right that this drug got out of shadow only when there was a need to cure an American. I mean, of course, thanks God, that i have real chance of soon beco…
Treating an ebola patient is complicated.
Treating an ebola patient who has a bunch of weird side effects caused by an experimental drug makes a sub-optimal situation much worse.
Re: Ebola: Experimental drug ZMapp is '100% effective' in animal trials
#15I'm surprised that so much of the coverage of ZMapp doesn't include the fact that the drug is produced in tobacco plants. To me, this is the single most interesting and impressive fact. It's also likely the main reason why "the limited supplies will not help the 20,000 people predicted to be infected during the outbreak in West Africa." Scaling production of antibodies grown in plants can't possibly be straightforwar…
DARPA thinks it's a scalable method, at least for producing flu vaccines:
"Accelerated Manufacture of Pharmaceuticals (AMP), companies in four states are building facilities where they can quickly produce vaccine-grade proteins grown in the cells of tobacco plants. Once they produce the proteins, the goal is for each company to scale up its process to produce 100 million doses of H1N1 flu vaccine per month."
Re: Ebola: Experimental drug ZMapp is '100% effective' in animal trials
#16why we still test effectiveness on animals when there are several thousands of people who has no downside and only upside for the drug to be tested on them? Ethics? It would be a strange ethics that had worked only until an American needed the cure. Something isn't right that this drug got out of shadow only when there was a need to cure an American. I mean, of course, thanks God, that i have real chance of soon beco…
Treating an ebola patient is complicated. Treating an ebola patient who has a bunch of weird side effects caused by an experimental drug makes a sub-optimal situation much worse.
> ..makes a sub-optimal situation much worse.
I guess the OP's point was how much more sub-optimal can the situation get if the alternative to not trying the experimental drug is the death of the patient.
Re: Ebola: Experimental drug ZMapp is '100% effective' in animal trials
#17why we still test effectiveness on animals when there are several thousands of people who has no downside and only upside for the drug to be tested on them? Ethics? It would be a strange ethics that had worked only until an American needed the cure. Something isn't right that this drug got out of shadow only when there was a need to cure an American. I mean, of course, thanks God, that i have real chance of soon beco…
Why do you say there is no downside? As Jonathan Kaplan points out in the comments of the article Crito links to, Ebola is not 100% fatal and several drugs that have worked in animals have proven to have catastrophic effects when administered to humans (see e.g. TGN1412 [1]).
Re: Ebola: Experimental drug ZMapp is '100% effective' in animal trials
#18It's interesting to me that people are working on a cure for Ebola yet no one is deeply interested in working on new antibiotics. Ebola is a scary disease yet rare (across the entire planet) so there doesn't seem to be a lot of monetary reason to invest in it. Antibiotic resistance is far more widespread. I guess I don't always understand how the pharmaceutical industry decides what to look at.
Ebola has been around for decades, and this is an experimental drug. The fact is that interest in experimental drugs for Ebola has only cropped up recently, so this doesn't really prove any point about interest in antibiotics.
Re: Ebola: Experimental drug ZMapp is '100% effective' in animal trials
#19It's interesting to me that people are working on a cure for Ebola yet no one is deeply interested in working on new antibiotics. Ebola is a scary disease yet rare (across the entire planet) so there doesn't seem to be a lot of monetary reason to invest in it. Antibiotic resistance is far more widespread. I guess I don't always understand how the pharmaceutical industry decides what to look at.
New antibiotics are in the works all the time. We are currently in an arms race with infections; I recall reading that new antibiotics are expected to last for only 10 years, and future antibiotics are going to last even less time (before resistance develops)
Why doesn't it get more press? I don't know for sure, but it is:
- Ongoing, which makes for bad news
- Kind of depressing, because we are slowly losing the battle
- Feels a little bit hopeless, because foolish choices by individuals accelerate the development of resistance, and inventing new antibiotics doesn't fix that fundamental problem
Re: Ebola: Experimental drug ZMapp is '100% effective' in animal trials
#20I'm surprised that so much of the coverage of ZMapp doesn't include the fact that the drug is produced in tobacco plants. To me, this is the single most interesting and impressive fact. It's also likely the main reason why "the limited supplies will not help the 20,000 people predicted to be infected during the outbreak in West Africa." Scaling production of antibodies grown in plants can't possibly be straightforwar…
DARPA thinks it's a scalable method, at least for producing flu vaccines: "Accelerated Manufacture of Pharmaceuticals (AMP), companies in four states are building facilities where they can quickly produce vaccine-grade proteins grown in the cells of tobacco plants. Once they produce the proteins, the goal is for each company to scale up its process to produce 100 million doses of H1N1 flu vaccine per month." http://w…
Right. It certainly seems like a much more scalable way to produce antibodies. It's just getting all the infrastructure in place that's going to be a challenge.