“The fact that Gage’s group can replicate the hyperexcitability characteristic in neurons from additional bipolar disorder patients is very important. Findings like these are needed to utilize these cells to develop new drugs to treat mental illnesses.”
The naive person on the street might think that advances in predicting who reponds to lithium is important to allow doctors to give those patients lithium. That doesn’t seem to be where the scientists see the value in this case. It’s that the process helps with developing new drugs that can then be patented and given to patients.
First, to be clear, the article itself very plainly doesn’t take such a view; right from the headline, it leads with the obvious application of giving lithium to patients it’s likely to help and not to patients it isn’t likely to help.
Second, the article quotes from “the scientists” several times, and most of what they say is about the actual work and its value in predicting response to lithium treatment.
Third, there is obviously absolutely nothing wrong with seeing “might be useful in development of new drugs” as a good and important thing. It’s not as if mental (or any other sort of) health is a solved problem where it’s impossible to imagine how any new drugs could possibly improve on what we have already.
Fourth, the commercial perspective you imply (”… that can then be patented …”) is something you just made up and is neither stated nor implied in anything the scientists are quoted as saying.
For the avoidance of doubt, it’s eminently possible (1) that drug researchers focus too much on the possibility of developing new drugs rather than improving the effectiveness of existing ones and (2) if so, that they do so partly for commercial reasons. But this article offers no evidence of either.
(The people quoted, and the scientists responsible for the actual research under discussion, all seem to be working for non-profits, universities, and government institutes. These are not the people I would be fingering as most likely to be interested only in commercial profits from patented new drugs.)
Sure. I don’t claim it’s impossible for people in such positions to be interested (or excessively interested) in commercialization. Only that these aren’t exactly prime suspects.
From what I have seen acquiring third-party funding is important for most biochemical researchers these days. A researcher who tells an evaluating committee that they aren’t interested in acquiring third-party funding from industry has a hard time getting a professorship.
Today’s version of what’s wrong with the medical system: https://www.salk.edu/news-release/new-method-predicts-will-respond-lithium-therapy/ was recently shared. The article is about a paper that successfully predicted which patients benefit from lithium supplementation.
It contains a very interesting quote:
The naive person on the street might think that advances in predicting who reponds to lithium is important to allow doctors to give those patients lithium. That doesn’t seem to be where the scientists see the value in this case. It’s that the process helps with developing new drugs that can then be patented and given to patients.
Sorry, but this is absurdly unfair.
First, to be clear, the article itself very plainly doesn’t take such a view; right from the headline, it leads with the obvious application of giving lithium to patients it’s likely to help and not to patients it isn’t likely to help.
Second, the article quotes from “the scientists” several times, and most of what they say is about the actual work and its value in predicting response to lithium treatment.
Third, there is obviously absolutely nothing wrong with seeing “might be useful in development of new drugs” as a good and important thing. It’s not as if mental (or any other sort of) health is a solved problem where it’s impossible to imagine how any new drugs could possibly improve on what we have already.
Fourth, the commercial perspective you imply (”… that can then be patented …”) is something you just made up and is neither stated nor implied in anything the scientists are quoted as saying.
For the avoidance of doubt, it’s eminently possible (1) that drug researchers focus too much on the possibility of developing new drugs rather than improving the effectiveness of existing ones and (2) if so, that they do so partly for commercial reasons. But this article offers no evidence of either.
(The people quoted, and the scientists responsible for the actual research under discussion, all seem to be working for non-profits, universities, and government institutes. These are not the people I would be fingering as most likely to be interested only in commercial profits from patented new drugs.)
Most universities pressure their biochemical researchers to do research that allows them to get money from the private sector.
There are political efforts to get universities to do research that benefits the private sector and that can be commercialized.
Sure. I don’t claim it’s impossible for people in such positions to be interested (or excessively interested) in commercialization. Only that these aren’t exactly prime suspects.
From what I have seen acquiring third-party funding is important for most biochemical researchers these days. A researcher who tells an evaluating committee that they aren’t interested in acquiring third-party funding from industry has a hard time getting a professorship.