OBSERVATIONS ON SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY FROM A NON SCIENTIST

Posted on November 26, 2011 by Jeffrey Newman

I try to read several scientific and medical journal articles each day. My particular interest is not just on newly developed therapeutics but rather the  processes and considerations of  researchers searching for new therapies for chronic diseases.  Often this is difficult to decipher merely from the published studies because they do not generally include an etiology of the research as to WHY researcher chose to study a particular compound and HOW they created a strategy for their work (if there was one). Often, these processes are revealed in interviews given with the lay press in which a broader discussion of the context of the findings emerges. There are a few pathways I have observed from readings and which I have mentioned in the blogs on this site. One is serendipity–when a researcher happens upon a piece of information, essentially by accident and pursues the thought and then study of a particular drug or compound. Not an infrequent occurence and the basis of discovery of such drugs as aspirin, Viagra,  sulphur drugs, penicillin and chemotherapies. Perhaps it is more accurate to call this the accidental origin of drugs. It is also the fodder of some excellent writing including an article entitled CHANCE AND THE PREPARED MIND IN DRUG DISCOVERY by Sunny Y. Auyand. PhD. Serendipidy was at the root of the development of Memantine, with a new drug used to mitigate damage to the synapses in the brain to protect the cells from Alzheimer’s disease and other dimentias. The primary researcher was on sabbatical in Germany and noted a new drug being used for the treatment of Parkinson’s Disease. He figured out that the central effects were in the synapses and that it might be usable for Alzheimer’s disease and began researching the effects on synaptic cells. The drug Memantine (blocks glutamate receptors in the synapses) and now being combined with nitroglycerine and is used for treatment of dimentia in many forms. I wrote about this and the need for us to systematize and speed up the process of serendipity in medical research through data mining. The second process I see is a kind of copycat method, where useful drugs are studied for their chemical compositions and tweeked for drugs, slightly different and better. A siny difference in a chemical compound can make a vast difference in the human body. For example chemotehrapy drugs still have as a chief detriment, emesis response, where patients have the urge to throw up after taking the drug. Much effort is being placed on remediating this problem through slight alterations of the chemicals. I think this is a major methodology in the drug industry presently and may be a hinderance in limiting the variety of possible therapies and clustering research into too few bins. The other pattern,  is an observational/analytical thought process deriving from the body’s own biological processes developed over millions of years. This is my favorite. Here, scientists examine what the body does in response to early disease process. For example at The Massachusetts General Hospital, researchers went back and examined a clinical study of the blood and tissue of early Parkinson’s patients and learned that the body was producing  higher levels of Urate (uric acid) in response. The observation into a theory that urate may help to slow or possibly prevent Parkinson’s disease and clinical studies are now in full bloom. This concept of examining the processes and the trails of scientific study will, in my opinion, help to create more evolved concepts of disease treatments.