4 ms·
Your concern is correct. Suppressing the immune system is a 2-edged sword - a little suppression in the right setting, is extremely beneficial, but go overboard
by jonathan-adly 4y ago
Your concern is correct. Suppressing the immune system is a 2-edged sword - a little suppression in the right setting, is extremely beneficial, but go overboard and it is harmful. That's why in a perfect world, we would have large human trials with different dosages and iterate until we can get the maximum benefit and the least harm.
The problem is, no one wants to do those trials because rapamycin is cheap and generic. Why would Pharma spend money on something that they can't patent? Also, these kind of trials have to go on for 10+ years at a minimum - which is cost-prohibitive even if it is patentable (not to go in the weeds, but long trials count in the period of exclusivity given to pharma patents).
I believe the right approach is to use it off-label, be upfront about the potential risks, and collect lots of data so you can improve as you go. Practical anti-aging so to speak.
Another approach is through the NIH grant pathway, but that has a lot of road-blocks as well.
- nico 4y ago> The problem is, no one wants to do those trials because rapamycin is cheap and generic. Why would Pharma spend money on something that they can't patent? Same issue with psychedelics. However, they are so useful that people in the medical/therapeutic/academic fields are doing tons of research anyway. Apparently big pharma is also trying to create their own psychedelics (there was an article about it on the front page of HN recently). So far, the business seems like it will be on the assisted therapy side and everything that it entails. So more like services instead of products.
- trevorishere 4y agoSPRAVATO is an example— one of the hands of Ketamine.
- webnrrd2k 4y agoWhy don't insurance companies fund some of this research? Honestly, I don't know. Wouldn't they want to get treatment costs down? Large HMOs, especially, have motivation to control treatment costs, and access to the patients, data, etc... to make it work.
- ddingus 4y agoDelivering care counts toward their margins, regulated by the ACA. I forget the exact number, but it is 80 percent to be spent on care, something like that. The key thing is more care = more dollars = more in the bank. One response to that legislation was insurers buying care providers.
- sreedhark 4y agoI came across this HN discussion, Human Rapamycin Longevity Clinical Trials Begin - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27556564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27556564 https://www.lifespan.io/campaigns/pearl-participatory-evaluation-of-aging-with-rapamycin-for-longevity/ https://www.lifespan.io/campaigns/pearl-participatory-evalua...
- rewgs 4y ago> That's why in a perfect world, we would have large human trials with different dosages and iterate until we can get the maximum benefit and the least harm. Off topic, but whenever I think about this, I find myself thinking that what the world really needs is next-level human/medicinal modeling. Imagine if human trials didn't have to happen in order to know the long-term effects (and in a fraction of the time)!
- ETH_start 4y agoI'm pretty sure AI could do this with enough data.
- tsol 4y agoI'm sure. But it's data we don't even have right now. We don't even know every chemical that naturally occurs in the body, how are we supposed to predict how they could interact with novel chemicals? Some day, though, it may be possible. There was a point where people couldn't imagine these image generation AIs working
- ETH_start 4y agoYea, data collection is the key here. If we had unobstrusive sensors that people could wear and embed in their body, to continuously measure a multitide of biometrics, that would greatly empower bio-AI systems.
- giantg2 4y agoI'd imagine we'd have to have complete knowledge of the human body to completely replace human testing. There's a hell of a lot that we don't know, especially when it comes to why or how things work.