[codekilla]

I have been reading a book recently: The Story of Taxol: Nature and Politics in the Pursuit of an Anti-Cancer Drug, and one of the most fascinating parts was the way they discovered this molecule. Long story short, Taxol is a molecule they isolated from the bark of the Pacific Yew. The interesting part for me was learning about the Cancer Chemotherapy National Service Center [1]. They went around collecting samples of random plants, then tested them for anti-cancer properties very systematically. So in the U.S., at one point, we had a publicly funded drug discovery program targeted at a specific disease, and this is what jump started Pharma research in anti-cancer drugs. I would say we need to restart a program like this, and of course we should also focus on rare diseases--we stand to learn a tremendous amount, and it's difficult to convince industry to do it.

Personally, I'm a computational/mathematical biologist and I work on single cell data targeting multiple myeloma, I'd really like to see serious non-profit Pharma. Drug repurposing seems like the most feasible avenue. What I know of right now is open Pharma [2].

[1] https://dtp.cancer.gov/timeline/flash/milestones/M3_CCNSC.ht... [2] https://www.ospfound.org

[biols]

The Broad Institute hosts a very interesting transcriptomic dataset called CMap [1] that was intended to facilitate rapid drug repurposing. Having studied this dataset and worked with the data generators and software teams, I can say that drug repurposing is NOT as straightforward as people think. However, I agree that as a strategy drug repurposing is a useful tool in the arsenal generally.

[1] https://clue.io

[codekilla]

Interesting....I'll have a close look at this, thank you. I didn't mean to imply drug repurposing was straightforward, certainly as you say this is very challenging. I guess my thinking was that there might be relatively lower hanging fruit here (if Pharma companies have very little incentive to exhaustively search for repurposing targets for off-patent meds, maybe only a non-profit would be willing to do this) than say de-novo development.

[adriand]

This is one of the many reasons that causing plant and animal species to go extinct is bad for humans. We really have no idea how many potentially live-saving/health-enhancing/etc. medicines we are annihilating!

[netizen-936824]

Out of curiosity, what does your work entail with single cell stuff from a computational perspective? I've been doing some research into molecular docking as a drug discovery method, but its all single protein.

[codekilla]

There are a lot of modalities being integrated, things like spatial/temporal, ADT/protein, etc. Integrating all of this data is a computational challenge, and of course there are lots of methods for analyzing it that vary in computational demands. It's not simulation, but still a lot of processing.

[netizen-936824]

So you're taking all wet bench data and analyzing or integrating it rather than modeling? That's interesting!

Are there any possibilities that you see from your experience in using modeling or other in silico methods to reduce time in the lab, find new leads in drug development, or otherwise enhance research capabilities?

[codekilla]

Yes, essentially, though you may create models of interactions etc., but the main idea is to extract information from various aspects of the cell.

As far as in silico, I think absolutely there are probably opportunities here. Generative models might be useful for some type of counterfactual (automated) reasoning with respect to disease course/treatment. I think we're in the relatively early days of collecting high resolution cellular data, so I think in silico approaches like this will be more and more relevant.

[mrjangles]

What I find interesting is that most western countries have this kind of government funded programs of one kind or another... and yet they hardly produce any medical breakthroughs.

Perhaps the interesting thing would be to ask what particular thing makes the US different to other western countries, rather than cherry picking one particular thing that happens to agree with whatever ideology is popular today.