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- Medical Breakthru by 17-year old
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Charles E Hill Tue, 30 Jan 2007 14:34:54 PST Health and Medicine
- What could be a life-saving breakthrough in the fight against cystic fibrosis, cancer and AIDS has been achieved by a 17-year-old Indian-American student at the Mississippi Institute of Mathematics and Science.
- While Madhavi could become a millionaire by patenting her work, she has something else in mind: making it openly available. She points out, "If I were going to patent this, the rights would have to be sold to a pharmaceutical company, and that would greatly increase the cost of the drug once it's developed. So to prevent that from happening, by publishing it, the information becomes readily available and any company that wants to manufacture it, would be able to. So the price would be much lower due to competition and the people who need it most will have access to it."
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- Medical Breakthru by 17-year old
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Spider Tue, 30 Jan 2007 15:00:17 PST
- Exciting news for sufferers of the diseases mentioned. Nice to see Madhavi Gavini wants this breakthrough to be available to all. I hope this is not going to be another one of the "medical breakthrough" stories that you never hear about again.
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- good evening, Mr. Phelps....
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zogger Tue, 30 Jan 2007 15:28:38 PST
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ah, a task! Glad you chose to accept the assignment, heh. Set your calendar, one year for now go see if there are any updates and if so, post them.
You brought it up! And I agree with you too, we hear of all these amazing new "things", then seems like most of the time they evaporate into the aether.
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- good evening, Mr. Phelps....
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John Smith Tue, 30 Jan 2007 16:44:25 PST
- Predominantly because the things that articles get posted on are too far away from clinical testing to be verifiably working. You hear about breakthroughs in potential medication, but the truth is that massive amounts of safety analysis has to be done before something is truly considered allowable, and even then it's touch and go as to whether or not the thing will get approved - look at Vioxx as an example. It was an enormously powerful medical breakthrough with some largely unknown and difficult to explain side effects, and because of those side effects it died a horrible death. Even the most innocuous-seeming and incredible medical breakthrough will have unforeseen side effects, the full ramifications of which won't be known until deep statistics are produced. That's why it's silly to take articles like this as any more than 'huh, that could be interesting' bits, and purely academic exercises. Treatment doesn't come for a long time, and adoption of treatment by the medical community typically takes even longer.
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- good evening, Mr. Phelps....
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President4242 Tue, 30 Jan 2007 16:57:17 PST
- Yeah, but it happens with other things as well. For instance, I saw an article back in 1986 in the Statesman Journal about a guy in Idaho who had created an alpha radiation-to-alternating current converter. He had it refined to the point that a small radioactive source, surrounded by the converter, surrounded by a lead can the size of a gallon soup can, was producing 75 watts. The article contained a prediction that for $15,000 you could remove your house from the grid with this invention. And then nothing for several years- the next home use nuclear power I heard about was the Canadian Thorium Hot Water Heater for use in the Northern Territories. I wonder what ever happened to that guy?
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- good evening, Mr. Phelps....
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scott7477 Wed, 31 Jan 2007 06:22:54 PST
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Since Ms. Gavini has made her findings publicly available, I suppose there is nothing stopping any person from using her results to test the treatment on themselves. Now that I consider it, she could still earn some money from this work by coming up with a delivery system for this treatment and publishing a book on how to isolate the correct molecule and make a usable drug from it. I believe that a lot of folks would be willing to self-medicate if standard medical procedures aren't helping them.
This story is a nice reminder that you don't have to climb the academic ladder and get a position at a leading research institute to produce meaningful research. I suppose most Technocrat members have had some idea or other that you've dabbled with that you think might possibly become successful; I know I have a few projects on my wish list. Let's get doing something on those projects :).....
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- Medical Breakthru by 17-year old
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zogger Tue, 30 Jan 2007 15:24:59 PST
- What a wonderful and smart and altruistic young lady! And double plus good to see some of the old remedies being proven scientifically. I am a rather big fan of some of the old herbalist folklore.
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- Medical Breakthru by 17-year old
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phred14 Wed, 31 Jan 2007 08:11:48 PST
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Unfortunately this is too cheap and easy, traits probably shared by all "folk remedies."
Our pharmaceutical industry is driven by big-science innovations that can be patented and milked for as many years as possible before the patent lapses and generics become possible. The more recent trend is the new patent on the tweaked drug that is going off patent, for more years of milking. For example, the 3 gold rings added to the purple pill. I know it isn't as simple as 3 gold rings, but there's a molecular tweak that eked out another patent behind all of that.
Personally, I suspect that in health terms, folk remedies are a gold mine being currently neglected. While most likely many are worthless this story shows that some can be quite worthwhile. We need to subject folk remedies to the same rigorous trials and studies that laboratory drugs are. Unfortunately here's the rub. The trial and approval process itself is so expensive that medications which are likely to be cheap, whether derived from folk remedies or laboratories, are unlikely to provide sufficient payback to get done in the first place.
Finding a solution to paying for trials and approval of "cheap" medicines would do a heck of a lot for public health.
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- Clinical Trials?
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bill_mcgonigle Thu, 01 Feb 2007 06:50:35 PST
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That's nice, but who's going to pay for a clinical trial to get, say an inhaler, FDA approved? Hopefully a cystic fibrosis foundation has the funds to do it, but they might not want to take on the multi-million dollar risk. BigPharma exists to do just that.
I'd tell her to patent it, take the money, and plow it back into more research if she's feeling altruistic.
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- Clinical Trials?
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Simon Thu, 01 Feb 2007 10:21:21 PST
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These days novel delivery of an existing drug is patentable, so the drug companies shouldn't have any trouble patenting derivative works with which to protect further investments. Of course that might not result in the cheap medicines she foresees.
Of course the first question would be toxicology. Is it safe? The article doesn't say enough to comment, but there are a lot of drugs that kill all sorts of pathogens that we don't use. Having a thyroid issue, I'm aware of the power of Iodine to kill pretty much everything it comes into contact with (microbes, fungi, small animals, people). Which doesn't deter the "alternative medicine" crowd from suggesting people use Iodine for all sorts of things, when the scientists are still waking up to not using it as a surgical disinfectant, or as contrast dye, or water sterilization, because of the potential for undesirable effects.
Still it sounds a lot more useful than anything I did at that age.
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- Clinical Trials?
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bill_mcgonigle Thu, 01 Feb 2007 11:19:16 PST
- I concur, and getting the information out there is is helpful itself. I know if I were dying from this bacteria I'd mix up some kind of concoction of the herb and inhale it. Not much harm it can do at that point. So she's already making marks in the 'helpful column'. It's just that our medicine process is so expensive that simple solutions often have trouble in the marketplace.
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