3 ms·
>Exceptions exist of course, and some of these bets turn good purely because of luck (if you take twenty random chemicals and inject, one of them might just cur
by sjg007 6y ago
>Exceptions exist of course, and some of these bets turn good purely because of luck (if you take twenty random chemicals and inject, one of them might just cure cancer; incidentally how stuff like paclitaxel & vinblastine was discovered anyway).
Vinblastine was discovered from folk tea remedies for diabetes. In animal models they saw decreased white blood cell counts.
Paclitaxel was discovered from the NCI plant screening program. The chemical was observed to be cytotoxic in screening studies.
So both of your examples have pre-clinical evidence. These were not randomly injected and developed through scientific research and the clinical trial program.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_cancer_chemotherapy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_cancer_chemotherapy
- ramraj07 6y agoVinblastine was discovered when they were testing a folk remedy for diabetes and found cytotoxic effects so it was completely tangential to the study’s goals, and in modern parlance, an instance of a “task failed successfully.” Paclitaxel was discovered literally from a random spray and pray scan of plant samples from every taxonomic class, here I will quote a literal sentence from a review: “ Barclay collected T. brevifolia, an evergreen, apparently because the strategy was to collect at random. Not much was known about the tree. It belonged to the genus Taxus...” (https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/whatischemistry/landmarks/camptothecintaxol.html https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/whatischemistry... ) So I still believe in what I said, which is random screens or complete serendipity often has been the best ways to get t a lot of our therapies, though I’m not advocating for more of that necessarily.
- sjg007 6y agoWhere you say random I think you mean systematic.