Another thing that irks me

Vox has a new post about Frances Collins remark that if the NIH had better funding, we would have an ebola vaccine by now.  Vox says this isn’t true.  I think this was addressed briefly during the hearing.  The NIH went for years looking for a partner for vaccine research in the private sector and couldn’t find one.  Finally, they got GSK and another company interested in development.

Here’s what Vox doesn’t understand about drug discovery research and I have seen this repeated time and time again until it has become ingrained and hard to dislodge:

The NIH is not the only player necessary to take vaccines to market. The agency’s role in pharmaceutical development is usually basic research, giving scientists grants to look at how diseases function and what can stop them.

When it’s time to use that science to build a vaccine, that’s where drug companies typically come in, paying for the trials and manufacturing. We don’t know whether, in a world where the NIH had more funding, a pharmaceutical company would have stepped forward to do this. There’s decent reason to believe there wouldn’t have been; a vaccine to treat Ebola, an infrequent disease that hits low-income areas of the world, is hardly a blockbuster.

This is the conventional wisdom but it is incorrect.  The NIH does provide valuable basic research but the key word here is basic.  It’s not like the NIH develops a vaccine that just needs to be “built” by private industry.  It’s the same thing with drugs for cancer or any other illness.  The NIH provides very basic starting points.  After that, private industry has to pour massive amounts of money into research to fill out the details to get it to the point where it can be built.

What Vox and others do not understand is that private industry research is Real RESEARCH.

Now, if Vox wants the NIH to do the same kind of research that private industry is doing, starting with basic nuggets performed in NIH sponsored labs and publishing work that frequently can not be reproduced in private industry labs (I have been there, Ezra Klein), then it will need a lot more funding.

And this may be necessary anyway because private industry has decided that Real RESEARCH is way too risky and it would prefer not to do it anymore. (Hence the hundreds of thousands of layoffs that we refer to as Pharmageddon)  So, if we want a vaccine for anything, it may eventually have to come from the NIH.  That is what Collins is referring to.  NIH can only go so far without a private partnership.  If the partnership isn’t there and funding is cut, guess  what?  No vaccine.

This has been another episode of a former drug discovery researcher fruitlessly trying to correct the record.

“Travel Ban” is the new Republican “Cut and Run”

Remember the Cut and Run vote?  I do.  If I recall correctly, some Congress people nearly came to blows over it.

But just because Republicans keep saying “Travel Ban” doesn’t mean it makes any damn sense.

So, let me try to explain why the travel ban is counterproductive:

As Friedan and Fauci tried to explain, the West African countries affected have very porous borders.  People can get out of them and into them without much trouble.  If you impose a travel ban, you restrict direct flights to the US.  But the routes out of other African countries are not affected.  Heck, you can cross over into Europe or the Middle East pretty easily from Africa.  So, imposing a travel ban does not restrict people in the hot zone from coming here.  What it does is prevent those who would otherwise take the quickest and most direct route from being monitored.

Therefore, a travel ban could actually backfire and allow the entry of unmonitored hot zone travelers.  That is not to say that quarantine is out of the question.  It’s perfectly reasonable.  But try to explain all of that to someone scared senseless by E-B-O-L-A!!!

But the biggest problem with the travel ban argument is that it is so successful at portraying Democrats as being lax, unconcerned and callous.  Congratulations, Republicans.  You have once again pummeled an unarmed opponent silly because, to this date, I have yet to see Democrats come up with two or three word phrases that cut to the amygdala as effectively as the Republicans do.

I can repeat over and over that friends don’t let friends vote Republican but I am having a hard time endorsing the student body presidents on the other side.  They are becoming more and more feckless and can barely defend themselves.

{{exasperated sigh}}

Live Blogging the Congressional Hearings on US Ebola Response

Disclaimer: This is not a panic/hysteria site.  We’re interested in learning all we can about the US response to the disease and whether our governmental institutions are funded adequately to respond optimally.

With that in mind, you can watch the hearings online at PBS.org.  So far, we have had opening statements from the CDC (Friedan), NIH (Fauci), BARDA (Robinson), FDA (Borio) and a representative from Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital.

The most notable announcement so far was from Anthony Fauci from the NIH.  He says that Nina Pham will be transferred to the NIH this evening for further treatment.

Also note that there will be a lot of Republicans and Democrats on this committee who voted to cut the budgets of these institutions when they approved the sequester.  So, keep that in mind when you listen to these bloviators.

And, now, on with the live blog.  Geeks are encouraged to comment because I’m pretty sure there is going to be technical information presented, especially wrt to drug discovery efforts.

 

Clueless scientist asks a very dangerous question

How the world sees scientists. Thank you, Underdog.

Note: Congressional hearings on the US Ebola efforts are going on right now with representatives from CDC, NIH, BARDA, FDA and others.  You can watch it here.  If anyone wants a live blog, let me know.  I invite other geeky types to watch and summarize, especially those of us with knowledge of the drug discovery/biotech area.

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No, it’s not me.  I admit to being clueless sometimes but not when it comes to the distribution of information.

I’m talking about Leonard Adleman who wrote an Op/Ed in the NYTimes about how easy it would be to revive smallpox.  The reason it would be theoretically easy is because the sequence for the smallpox virus is available online.  So, some really clever evil genius with a garage lab could potentially order up a copy of the gene from one of the synthetic gene specialists in South San Francisco and piece the sucker together using, oh, I don’t know, a variola, vaccinia or orthopox virus just hanging around.  It sounds complicated and might take some time, and if the independent researcher was born in the 80’s, there’s a good chance he’ll die of the disease if he’s not careful.  But it is possible.

Personally, I’m more concerned about reviving the 1918 influenza strain and getting it to go airborne, which, if I recall correctly, was successfully done a few years ago in Europe.  From what I remember, the researchers on that team suppressed the sequence.  Funny, I can’t seem to google that info.  Hmmm…

But getting back to Adleman, he’s not so keen on us just publishing the sequences on public databases.  Maybe it would be better if we just restricted access and only let the professionals see them.  That’s just nuts for a couple of reasons.  The first is that through the years, I have noticed that the sciences are full of people with psychopathic tendencies.  Fortunately, most of them get promoted out of the lab into management.  But just because they might be working at a prestigious lab with unrestricted access to information doesn’t mean they’re not out to get us.  After all, we still don’t know who did the anthrax attacks and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a garage biologist.

The second reason is, referring to smallpox especially, we have a vaccine for that.  Oh sure, there will be plenty of thirty year olds who may be at risk but an outbreak would be limited.

And for the people who have extraordinary skill in making lethal viruses, I have a perfect solution: HIRE THEM!  Jeez, why in god’s name would you lay off hundreds of thousands of talented people and have them stew over the MBAs and shareholders who wrecked their careers??  Especially when there are auction sites where they can buy discounted equipment from mothballed labs?

I can’t see a teenager doing this, although we do have a lot of malicious computer viruses so who knows.  But they would have to be trained.  Just getting the sequence is not enough.  It’s not like writing code and you can’t get all your information from a book.  Maybe grad students would be capable if they’re motivated, so you tyrannical PIs out there should be on your guard.  But cooking up stuff in a lab takes practice and some good mentors to teach you how to do it.

In other words, it is possible that some well funded hostile country could fund this kind of work by sending some grad students to study in Dr. Adleman’s lab, for example.  He and his students would always have access to sequence data. But smallpox is not a threat and the other diseases are not so easily made.

But the best reason for not restricting access is that it once again takes out of the public domain millions of sequences for genes and proteins that the independent benevolent researcher has access to.  I think it’s great that the US publishes to the NIH PubMed and the European Mol Bio Organization provides this information for free to anyone who wants it.  Without sequence information, and the tools to process it, small, entrepreneurial companies would not have access to it without paying a fee.  That fee, like the high costs of accessing journal articles, could be a substantial barrier to admission to new businesses and new cures for diseases.

Think of it this way, without the information from sequence databases, Mapp Biopharmaceuticals, the company that discovered ZMapp, might never have gotten off the ground.

It’s unlikely that I’m going to produce an ebola protein in the lab but I’m glad that someone published the sequence data so that another lab could make them, crystallize them and publish 47 different protein crystal structures to the web for anyone to access, including a former drug designer in Pittsburgh.  That means a lot to me.  And maybe some crazy kid out there who likes looking at these things and enjoys protein folds and modeling as much as I do will be inspired to find a cure for ebola and other diseases.

What worries me is that the fear that Adleman is producing will lead to those sequences being locked away forever so that only the rich and well connected have access to them.  It would be the equivalent of the Patriot Act.  We wouldn’t know what we had lost until the new Dark Ages descended on science.  Do we really want to leave this information in the hands of only those who can afford to access it?