3 ms·
That's a good summary but it's missing the context that these kinds of "hits" will most likely fail clinical trials. Many drugs look good at this stage in precl
by iskander 6y ago
That's a good summary but it's missing the context that these kinds of "hits" will most likely fail clinical trials. Many drugs look good at this stage in preclinical development and almost none of them show both safety (ph1 trial) and efficacy (ph3 trial).
There aren't actually that many low hanging therapeutic fruit out there, mostly we have to actually do the work to discover new mechanisms and make new compounds to target them.
- dstick 6y agoIt read like that would be different here, using the new method, wouldn’t it? Or did I misunderstand that?
- iskander 6y agoThe genes essential for cancer cells to grow in vitro could easily be quite different from those required to establish the tumor micro-environment, invade new tissues and fight off the immune system. They'll have many false negatives from the mismatch in context. Simultaneously, they might have false positives from e.g. differences in layout and density of tumor cells (2D/uniform vs. 3D heterogeneous tumor). And even if they get the right targets, finding drugs with an effective therapeutic index is hard. This might be a useful screening technique...but it's not the first high throughput screening method. They might have some successes, only trials will tell.