3 ms·
The article's conclusion would indicate that you would do use in-silico biology to 'discover' existing drugs. Then once computer methods can reliably discover,
by zevets 11y ago
The article's conclusion would indicate that you would do use in-silico biology to 'discover' existing drugs. Then once computer methods can reliably discover, say both penicillin and tetracycline, you'd push forward.
Funding this, however, would never come from industry. You'd need to convince NIH that spending many years rediscovering old drugs is the magic leap forward we need.
As someone ignorant of the field - has this been done? What is the state of validation in computer biology?
- jerryhuang100 11y agoyeah, more or less. it's called drug repositioning for 're-discovering' existing drugs for new indications. several firms are currently focusing on drug repositioning by mining fda databases such as drug adverse events data to mine possible new indications. major pharmas already use the find-new-trick-for-old-drug to find new usage (eg botax). by the way viagra is also such 're-discovered' drug as it was originally targeted for hypertension treatment with poor clinical trial results but with a surprising you-know-what 'side-effect' in some male patients. any way, the solution might not be so straight forward for in-silico biology as several major bottlenecks still hard to resolved, such as those failed clinical trials data are never revealed and shared, and the most cash-burning process still concentrate on clinical trial stages.