Biotech for Dummies?

November 14, 2005

The November issue of Wired has a short article on an alternative (or better a supplement) to human subject testing of pharmaceuticals, “Biotech Crash Test Dummies”. Machines, it seems, are helpful at the very earliest stages of testing, revealing “toxicity, purity, and metabolic activity.”

Right now, the drive toward early screening is motivated by profit (and an increasingly anxious population of pill-poppers – thank you, fen-phen and Vioxx). But drugmakers also see a broader future in medicines tailored to individual genetic variations. Already Affymetrix makes an index-card-sized plate that exposes DNA snippets from thousands of different genes to RNA from a drug-treated cell to check which genes get turned on or off. “You really need to look at the big picture of what’s going on in the body to know if a drug works,” says Affymetrix’s John Blume. “In the late ’80s, we could look at eight or 12 genes at a time. Now we can look at more than 30,000.”

This will not remove the need for human trials, but perhaps it will alleviate some of the risk. These are issues that are only going to grow as medicine continues to be able to do more and more for our aging population.