Trending in Science

[GST_Nemisis]

Hey all,

Wow I haven't been here in a while (cheers brad for the reminder!) and I thought I would stop by to post something I find very interesting, Current popular science research!

For those of you who remember me but did not know, I now work in biomedical research and I love to share scientific ideas. Today I'm posting about stapled peptides, a new(ish) technology which has HUGE potential, including curing cancer and many other diseases!

Put simply, staples peptides are chemically modified protien fragments which can be used to block or activate the function of other target protiens, such as blocking those which become "over active" and causes cancer. The chemical modification allows the peptide to be very stable and capable of entering cells, as opposed to staying in your bloodstream and/or being broken down in the gut.

Stapled peptides are also very cheap to make and in their very nature highly specific to the target protein, leading to reduced side effects over traditional chemical drugs.

Unsurprisingly, big business has become very interesting in this, but due to the low expense of production, any lab can develop these stapled peptides, allowing universities and research institute to make drugs for good instead of profit! I believe in the next 40 years a whole wave of these drugs will emerge and cure/treat many diseases, as do many other leading academics.

To find out more check out this short article:

http://www.rctherapy.net/stapled-peptides/

I love science and try to take an active interest into what's trending in the scientific world. If you would like more posts like this in future let me know

Also to anyone considering a career in science, my university times and PhD (molecular biology) were so amazing, if you love the science do it!

 

[MGCǂSpectre]

Most of the advanced science that can cure a lot of things is kept away from public for political and economic reasons. Sure believing is one thing but the reality a completely different thing. As long as the system is aimed at profit, it would not be of interest to make 'drugs for good instead of profit'.

Also some of the current medications have proven to be harmful and there are cases even of causing deaths.

 

[GST_Nemisis]

Well interestingly in the field of drug design there has been a shift in recently years from the realm of chemical studies to those of molecular biology, such as peptide therapeutics of which stapled peptides are an example. Previously drugs were found using large combinatorial libraries of chemical and screening those against model systems, whereas there is an now increasing drive to develop drugs that are peptide based, moving away from classical chemical biology and into molecular studies. I cannot stress how significant a change this is in the world of science, as using in vitro or peptide synthesis techniques to make peptides that are capable of having high potency, specificity while being cheap to develop is a completely different world from that of expensive chemical synthesis and screening. Whats more the technology to develop these peptides (e.g. phage display, ribosome display, peptide synthesis with reactive unnatural amino acid side chains) is all patent free and accessible to any lab. In fact many scientists, including myself, consider peptide therapeutics the holy grail of drug design and we are just at the tip of the iceberg of this field which is very exciting!!! While I'm sure there are many chemical drugs that are held back from the market until currently patented drugs lose their patent cover and *insert generic drug/government/political conspiracy here*, peptide therapeutics are a new breed of drug and are in no way a pipe dream and circumvent previous drug design techniques, just google Greg Winter who developed therapeutic antibody technology used to produce drugs such as herceptin. The future of this technology is very bright believe me! (you should believe me, I am supposedly an expert in this field!)

 

[brad.dude03]

Here's PhD Dan going (almost) right over my head, but this stuff sounds very, very cool. I'm very interested to see how pharmaceuticals will change in the coming years thanks to this shift, and whether the rate of discovery for previously sought-after drugs will suddenly spike.

You've come a long way, brother, and I miss you and your crazy posts around here.