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‘Dancing molecules’ successfully repair severe spinal cord injuries

news.northwestern.edu

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Re: ‘Dancing molecules’ successfully repair severe spinal cord injuries

#91

Post by tclancy »

yread wrote: post #79
markdeloura wrote: post #77

I find myself wondering whether a useful testing step between mice and people might be the community of small dogs with IVDD. French bulldogs, dachshunds, and corgis seem particularly susceptible and many of them wind up with rear paralysis. https://www.thedogsdown.com/how-can-ivdd-cause-paralysis/

My wife works on regenerative medicine for spine and they use dogs (and horses) a lot. Cells are similar and they suffer from the same problems. It's mostly dogs who die of natural causes though as dogs are too cute to experiment on...

You’d like to think that, but we’ve had multiple beagle rescues who would disagree. And they were the control population because the actual test subjects get killed.

Re: ‘Dancing molecules’ successfully repair severe spinal cord injuries

#92

Post by pilotneko »

therein wrote: post #90
pilotneko wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just noting that -mab therapeutics are not synthesized directly, they are produced in cloned cell lines. It’s practically impossible for one pharma company to replicate another companies -mab, since they will never have access to the exact cell line used to manufacture the original. Also, Rituximab hasn’t been fully characterized, hence the discovery of new uses. There is no such thing as generic when it comes to -ma…

Interesting point raising regulatory questions for sure. Should the government compel drug companies to share their cell lines to preserve the same market dynamics as generic drugs once a monoclonal antibody line product hits the timeline to go generic? After all, otherwise it would be somewhat similar to a drug company rejecting to share the chemical synthesis pathway and precursors saying "an ex-employee built this…

Well, that’s the thing, you can’t make a generic version of these drugs because you can’t fully characterize the structure. They are just way too big and complicated, which is scary because a single difference in a glycosolation site can induce an extreme immunogenic response.

Best the FDA can do is allow biosimilars and subject them to significantly more testing, which increases the cost 100x (compared to a traditional generic).

https://www.pfizer.com/sites/default/files/investors/financi...

Re: ‘Dancing molecules’ successfully repair severe spinal cord injuries

#93

Post by nicoburns »

ajuc wrote: post #80
adventured wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but if you think we should care about other people - it follows that we should also care about other creatures that can feel and think It doesn't automatically follow. I can entirely correctly, subjectively decide which living things I want to care about and which I do not. I can separate living things by a hierarchy of importance. Which is exactly what we do all the time with other people and our relationships to…

There's clearly a spectrum of consciousness between us and insects, there is no one clear-cut threshold, and some people are lower on it than some animals (see some neurological problems). Therefore arbitrarily deciding to put a strict care/don't care threshold on a species border is irrational. It makes much more sense to have a care/don't care spectrum, and not to limit it to one species.

I’m not so sure its clear that there’s a spectrum of consciousness. We have no way to observe consciousness (other than our own). For all we know, ants (or even trees or rocks) might well be just as conscious as us. We don’t have any evidence that they are, but that’s largely true of mammals and even other humans too.

Re: ‘Dancing molecules’ successfully repair severe spinal cord injuries

#94

Post by ErikVandeWater »

0x0nyandesu wrote: post #70
ErikVandeWater wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You said in your first comment it "devolves into a debate." Now you're saying there is no debate. Poor consistency/word choice also lowers the value of HN discussion.

Person A: this is not a good venue to have a debate. Person B: yes it is debate ensues Person B: I thought you were against debates. Picard facepalm You know I dated someone with bipolar disorder once. It went exactly like this. It's funny that HN threads exhibit the same behaviors.

Comedy at its finest! You've cast yourself as the person arguing that HN is a poor place for debates.

Re: ‘Dancing molecules’ successfully repair severe spinal cord injuries

#95

Post by dtgriscom »

tkahnoski wrote: post #50
genomer wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s what you think it is, and it happens to more than just mice. I toured a bioengineering lab where they were actively severing the spines of chimpanzees to perform fiber rerouting experiments. I think the normal citizen never thinks much if at all about this kind of thing because they’re never exposed to it. A few researchers have opened up to me personally about their personal psychological trauma caused by invol…

This is absolutely in the moral gray. The greater good, lesser of two evils, however you want to describe it whether it's right or wrong will get down to your personal beliefs. I had a family member involved in a cancer research that used mice and although he admitted it was sad, he did call them heroes. Understandably, I don't think that satisfies anyone strongly aligned with animal rights. In many other sciences we…

A hero makes heroic choices. These mice aren't making choices.

Re: ‘Dancing molecules’ successfully repair severe spinal cord injuries

#96

Post by mleonhard »

sidlls wrote: post #39

The last section about generalizing the treatment is a bit underwhelming. Have they seen any evidence it can be used outside this sort of repair? What about for neuropathies, as from diabetes or surgeries? Stroke? Other dysfunctions (e.g. erectile/genital) having nervous system issues as a contributing factor? Any treatment "might" have more general applicability--but surely there is some specific direction/class of…

A lot of cells will only grow when they feel familiar surroundings. This gel technique is used with various cell types. For example, pancreas cells will not grow alone in glass, but they will grow inside a specially-made gel that mimics their expected extra-cellular matrix [0].

[0] "A microenvironment-inspired synthetic three-dimensional model for pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma organoids" https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-021-01085-1

Re: ‘Dancing molecules’ successfully repair severe spinal cord injuries

#97

Post by loceng »

steelframe wrote: post #47
_Microft wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BioNTech is working on a vaccine against MS that is supposed to untrain the immune system to no longer attack own tissue. It should at least slow progress of the disease and even seems to have allowed to reverse early damages in mice. Let’s keep our fingers crossed. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29305956

Through the years I've seen dozens and dozens of "cures" for "MS" in mice (I put MS in quotes because, at this point, I've grown skeptical that the induced encephalitis mouse model is all that helpful in predicting drug performance for humans with MS). The closest thing we have to a "cure" is actually a medication that's been on the market for a while, but it was used to treat certain types of blood cancer before the…

Fetal stem cells also apparently can stop degeneration from MS abd regress it (heal the damage) if disease progression hasn't damaged the body's healing mechanisms too much; emcell.com

Re: ‘Dancing molecules’ successfully repair severe spinal cord injuries

#98

Post by ajuc »

nicoburns wrote: post #93
ajuc wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's clearly a spectrum of consciousness between us and insects, there is no one clear-cut threshold, and some people are lower on it than some animals (see some neurological problems). Therefore arbitrarily deciding to put a strict care/don't care threshold on a species border is irrational. It makes much more sense to have a care/don't care spectrum, and not to limit it to one species.

I’m not so sure its clear that there’s a spectrum of consciousness. We have no way to observe consciousness (other than our own). For all we know, ants (or even trees or rocks) might well be just as conscious as us. We don’t have any evidence that they are, but that’s largely true of mammals and even other humans too.

It's the same for other people and other animals, if you care about other people you should care about other mammals at least a little bit.

Re: ‘Dancing molecules’ successfully repair severe spinal cord injuries

#99

Post by [deleted] »

jonplackett wrote: post #7
hungryforcodes wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to start somewhere though.

I would guess things like how nerves and bones work is more similar across species than, say, how drugs might work on the brain, where a mouse brain is a hell of a lot different to human. Is that a reasonable assumption?

[deleted]

Re: ‘Dancing molecules’ successfully repair severe spinal cord injuries

#100

Post by ekianjo »

Nasrudith wrote: post #10
ekianjo wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mice models have a very bad track record when it comes to humans. Too much junk publications out there to push papers and get credits.

I thought the main point of mouse models was mostly to be a "first pass filter" for substances before moving onto other animals usually, sometimes humans if the straits are desperate enough. Cancer drugs in particular have little concern for long term side effects in their approval pipeline because the alternative may be having no long term.

First pass filters mean nothing when it comes to humans. 95% of all "stuff that works on mice" fails miserably on humans. We should treat such announcements with extreme skepticism.
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