5 ms·

Could we now please get a move on and use the same trick to develop new antibiotics?

• fuzzfactor 10y ago
  Roger, it's not the opiates, it's the trick: "An international team of researchers — . . . Their secret? Starting from scratch — with computational techniques that let them explore more than four trillion different chemical interactions." This was exactly my idea back in the mid-'70's when I thought of one of the ways computer science could be applied to drug development. Of course all we had were mainframes, but so did the drug companies. Then, my first employment was with a pharmaceutical producer, I got the impression they were actually further away from this compared to starting a whole new drug company from scratch itself. Until new antibiotics come along, when necessary you might want to investigate older, more well-established germ-killers like colloidal silver. The real thing is hard to beat, but it is outnumbered by quack versions and get-rich-quick schemers.