04 9 / 2011
Scientists mine databases to find old drugs a new purpose
For all the testing we do, drugs are still mysterious things—they can activate pathways we never connected with them or twiddle the dials in some far-off part of the body. To see if drugs already FDA-approved for certain diseases could be used to treat other conditions, scientists lined up two online databases and discovered two drugs that, when tested in mice, worked against diseases they’d never been meant for, suggesting that mining of such information could be a fertile strategy for finding new treatments.
The two new drug candidates were an epilepsy drug used to treat irritable bowel syndrome, and a heartburn drug that shows promise against lung cancer. These seem like unlikely pairings, but the approach is ingenious, cost-effective, and hopefully very fruitful.
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07 6 / 2010
"Sydney Brenner (quoted in Wilkins 1993) has remarked that animal development can proceed according to either the American or the European plan. Under the European plan (autonomous specification), you are what your progenitors were. Lineage is important. Under the American plan (conditional specification), the cells start off undetermined, but with certain biases. There is a great deal of mixing, lineages are not critical, and one tends to become what ones neighbors are."
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