7 ms·

> "The use of this peptide in patients is a long way away. It requires careful consideration about safety, about the appropriate group of patients for whom this

• sixQuarks 10y ago
  As long as people are aware of the risks and are willing to take the chance, I actually support this. It doesn't make sense that society doesn't blink an eye when we send our youth off to war to die, but heaven forbid if someone dies in the pursuit of knowledge, everybody goes batshit insane. At least if someone dies taking this stuff, we learn a lot. And if it actually ends up working, it benefits society tremendously.
  • devnonymous 10y ago
    Agreed... And its not just war but all the stuff that has proven to be bad for your health like tobacco, liquor, sugar etc is available for people to use at their own discretion, why not something that might actually help in the long run.
  • philipkglass 10y ago
    I agree with you. I also think that the current balance of pharmaceutical regulation and ways to circumvent it is pretty good. I wouldn't want anyone to be able to hawk novel drugs to the general public without full FDA approved clinical testing. But if there is a self-selected population of risk-tolerant, educated, affluent people who want to experiment on themselves using concepts from scientific papers and manufacturing from contract labs... I wish them all the best of luck, and I look forward to any exceptional results (beneficial or harmful).
  • derefr 10y ago
    > At least if someone dies taking this stuff, we learn a lot. We'd learn a lot more if they were being monitored as they took the stuff, though. And yet it's still considered unethical to run human trials without preceding animal trials, even when the alternative is people off doing those same trials to themselves without your assistance. We understand this problem in other domains—that's why "safe injection sites" for drug-addicts exist. So why has pharmaceutical research not cottoned on and begun offering "safe self-experimentation sites", complete with medical researchers + monitoring equipment to capture data, and nurses to help with bad reactions?
    • astrange 10y ago
      Because nobody wants to experiment on themselves and your experiment doesn't follow any scientific protocols?
      • derefr 10y ago
        Er, the context of this subthread is about people who already do experiment on themselves. People in the "nootropics community." There are a lot of them. You could try teaching these individuals experimental protocols if you like, but if you enforce them, that means you're the experimenter. You're not allowed to be the experimenter. You just have to hope they're doing something useful. Probably you'd point a lot of automated instrumentation at each room, rather than having any human observers giving anyone (costly) individual attention, because most of the experiments would be too mired in sources of error to tell you much. But keep in mind that the point wouldn't be to capture subtle things like drug efficacy. The point would be to find out about side-effects that might otherwise not be found, by having people around when they suffer adverse reactions to the drug to help the person not-die, and then being able to pull reports directly from the people who helped the person not-die, to find out (in clear medical terms) what the adverse reaction was.
        • evgen 10y ago
          > Er, the context of this subthread is about people who already do experiment on themselves. People in the "nootropics community." There are a lot of them They are not "experimenting" on themselves, they are simply engaging in a chemically-mediated attempt at wish fulfillment. There are few, if any, actual experimentation protocols being used and whenever I check out the scene to see if it is any better Instill find a random collection of anecdotes and poorly gathered "data points." I see no baseline data, no blinding or controls, the worst sorts of confirmation bias in data gathering and assessment, and people entering these "experiments" with a random selection of pre-exisiting conditions for which they are attempting self-medication. This is just an exercise in generating noise, not data.
  • bhouston 10y ago
    There are going to be side effects and probably severe ones. We just don't know them yet. Most newly invented drugs of various types never get approved because of either side effects or they are not actually effective in humans.
  • bronak1 10y ago
    https://www.novusbio.com/products/foxo4-peptide_nbp1-77175pep https://www.novusbio.com/products/foxo4-peptide_nbp1-77175pe... If any one wants to take one for the team lol
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  • alexpw 10y ago
    I support the notion that the government shouldn't control what we put into our bodies, but the counter is the burden to society because of the medical costs. I'd bet insurance companies would fight hard to reject coverage for anyone who publicly takes a non-FDA drug. If society supported the use of them, then they'd also have to support the aftermath, just like veterans.
    • sqeaky 10y ago
      But we don't really support our veterans.
      • jwatte 10y ago
        We spend a lot on our veterans; what you're thinking of is the fact that we could spend even more! (And/Or better)
  • saidajigumi 10y ago
    It doesn't make sense that society doesn't blink an eye when we send our youth off to war to die, but heaven forbid if someone dies in the pursuit of knowledge, everybody goes batshit insane. That's a great soundbite, but it rather ignores the long and continuing history of exploitation via the sales of snake-oil cures and "enhancements". I absolutely have problems with the existing pharmaceutical industry and the economics around that. But it's foolishness to fail to understand how we got here: countless centuries of people peddling fake cures (and even outright poison) to people in need. Likewise, it's mostly really hard to do actual, legitimate human-studies science that has a solid chance of advancing human knowledge. Thus the presence of things like experiment design as a discipline, ethics review committees around studies on human subjects, etc. This article specifically mentions that human studies are in the works, by teams that presumably conduct them in ways that are 1) ethical and 2) have a hope in hell of yielding useful long-term knowledge. OTOH, I have about zero confidence that random internet self-experimenting yahoos will produce any knowledge ROI on their risk investment.
  • Frogolocalypse 10y ago
    This is how we get the zombie apocalypse.
  • YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
    >> At least if someone dies taking this stuff, we learn a lot. The expectation of course is that someone else will die. From my experience, very few people [edit: who know what they're doing] are willing to actually kill themselves for science, or, say, endanger their children on the off chance it would "benefit society tremendously". That's just not morally tenable, if I may be so bold. If there is some sort of benefit to be had, society will benefit in the long run and it doesn't make any difference if the benefits come right now or in a couple of generations. Dropping safety procedures is only ever going to benefit individuals- and probably not the ones who willingly (and foolishly) step up to be human guniea pigs for unregulated "trials".
• prolly_a_moron 10y ago
  >It doesn't even matter if it's shown to not work on humans Case in point: 95% of the supplement industry.
• reasonattlm 10y ago
  Or you could try navitoclax, dasatinib, fisetin, piperlongumine, or any of the others tested so far in animal models and human cancer trials with well-understood pharmacology and that are easily purchased. The trick here is that the current state of assays for senescent cell presence in samples is pretty terrible if you're outside a lab, and there is little point in doing this without measuring the outcome.
• krapp 10y ago
  >My bet: this drug will be for sale on the internet illegally within a year (and probably fake half of the time). I think you're being generous. Why would anyone bother selling the real thing on the black market?
  • crystaln 10y ago
    Turns out selling real things is good for business, that's why the black market is filled with real things.
    • krapp 10y ago
      It's also filled with a lot of garbage. How many people are going to be able to verify that the "modified FOXO4-p53 interfering peptide filled brownies" they got from Silk Road are genuine? The effect isn't going to be immediate, and the placebo effect alone might make it seem as if it works.
      • m-j-fox 10y ago
        Simple. You also buy a bunch of old mice.
      • markatkinson 10y ago
        Probably the same way they verify their drugs potency. There are a lot of 3rd parties in these market places that provide services such as chemical analysis of vendors products and make these results available. In fact, it goes as far as the very vendors selling the drugs pay to have their goods independently verified and issued with a "certificate" of how good their quality is which they display on the product listing. These black markets or silk roads are not just a bunch of drug swinging deviants. A lot of the processes are very well thought out. As someone already mentioned their business relies heavily on their reputation so they tend to take care of it quite closely.
        • quirkafleeg 10y ago
          > There are a lot of 3rd parties in these market places that provide services such as chemical analysis of vendors products and make these results available. In fact, it goes as far as the very vendors selling the drugs pay to have their goods independently verified Who verifies the "independence" of the "3rd parties" and/or the reliability or honesty of their results? > As someone already mentioned their business relies heavily on their reputation so they tend to take care of it quite closely. Reputation is important to any business. Hence the practice of dishonest/insincere/bought and paid for reviews or endorsements.
• Udo 10y ago
  There is an overwhelming chance that a drug based on this will never see the light of day, and not just because medical professionals by and large hate the very idea of life extension, although they do. It's an unspecified peptide that purportedly triggers apoptosis in senescent cells to make room for new ones. There are places in the body where you absolutely do not want this, most importantly: nerve cells. If you trigger apoptosis in senescent nerve cells, they're just gone (with very few exceptions). You might have a shiny coat, but you'll be vegetative. Also, this effect has not even been reproduced, and they seem to be playing their cards very close to the chest, which is almost always a massive warning sign. Even the researchers themselves don't seem overly sure they're seeing a statistically significant effect, citing it works on some mice and not on others. Odds are, there is very little to see here.
  • Frogolocalypse 10y ago
    So. It makes zombies.
  • kpil 10y ago
    I was thinking this too, but do semnicent nerve cells actually exist, and so they function normally of they do?
  • devdoomari 10y ago
    on the other hand, kudos to the researchers not joining the hype train - it might be their best interest to 'hype up' their research, but they stood fast to their honesty
• gozur88 10y ago
  I hope so, and I hope the people who buy it discover all the side effects so I have enough information to make a rational decision.
• sdenton4 10y ago
  The most important part of the treatment is making sure to inject it in BOTH eyes...
  • phkahler 10y ago
    +1 - I remember that one, but reddit seems more likely to get a joke of this nature.