Help for spinal cord injuries?
This is tremendously encouraging:
The drug, called AZD1236 and developed by the pharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca, can reduce the “secondary damage” generated by the body’s response to spinal cord injury, they said in an article published Friday by the journal Clinical and Translational Medicine.
In animal experiments, AZD1236 promoted nerve regeneration, with 80% preservation in nerve function following spinal cord compression injury, which can occur following motor vehicle accidents or falls, the data showed.
This translated into an 85% improvement in movement and sensation following three days of treatment with AZD1236 and starting within 24 hours post-injury, according to the researchers.
That was in animals, and often drugs that show great promise with animals fizzle out in humans.
Also, the time frame is discouraging although unsurprising:
University of Birmingham Enterprise, a school-affiliated initiative that connects academic research with financial support, has filed a patent application for the use of AZD1236 in the treatment of spinal cord injury and is seeking investors and partners to help bring it to clinical trials.
They are already prepared to conduct Phase 2 trials, the second stage of the development process, which will take two years to complete, according to Ahmed.
If those are successful, a full Phase 3 trial, the final step in the process, could be started in two years and “if all goes well as we believe it will, this drug could be ready for use by spinal cord injured patients in approximately five years,” he said.
“Safety studies have already been performed with this drug in humans and the drug was extremely well tolerated at clinically relevant doses for up to six weeks,” Ahmed told UPI.
If it’s truly well-tolerated and it’s the only treatment that might prevent the terrible results of such injuries, why five years? I know they’re just following the protective rules that are in place for a good reason, but the slow pace does seem very frustrating.
They need to run a questionable study in healthy 25 year olds and then approve it for 5-11 year olds.
That’s how it works now right?
Advances by drug companies have saved so many lives but they have squandered a large amount of trust in the last two years and they are showing no signs of letting up.
Squander hardly seems to cover what they have done.
SCOTTtheBADGER,
‘squander hardly seems to cover what they have done’
To quote Harry Burns in the greatest movie about male/female relationships ‘When Harry Met Sally’ I WAS BEING NICE!
I hardly wish for a repeat of the short clinical trials followed by the experience we’ve had with the COVID shots, which worked for a while, but at a high price for some people.
I’ll ask my wife, a physical medicine and rehabilitation physician to look into this and let y’all know on this page ASAP.
I find it very encouraging. If nerve regeneration can occur at all, then it is simply a matter of discovering the right elements required to initiate it. Just knowing that something can be done is half the battle.
I hope this works and I hope the sponsors are just under-promising on the development timeline. It will take time to recruit subjects for Phase 2 and 3 —how do you sign up people until they have the relevant injury? And then how do you administer this time-sensitive treatment quickly enough to meet the protocol? I imagine they will have many emergency departments provisionally recruited “just in case” they get a qualifying case, but that means training a lot of people and probably deploying a lot of the drug (and placebo) that will not ever get used. Awkward and slow. Those more versed in this area should correct my take…
“It is simply a matter of …” says a random dude, rarely are things simple as that.
This isn’t Scurvey, Ricketts, Pellagra, or …..
Have you seen this regarding spinal repair? https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2021/11/dancing-molecules-successfully-repair-severe-spinal-cord-injuries/
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I have a “partial” spinal cord injury of unknown cause and It’s not a pleasant way to live. I truly hope this drug can help those with new spinal cord injuries avoid a lot of permanent damage
“If it’s truly well-tolerated and it’s the only treatment that might prevent the terrible results of such injuries, why five years? ”
If raw data on the patients was publicly blockchained, we could make our own decisions.
}}} If it’s truly well-tolerated and it’s the only treatment that might prevent the terrible results of such injuries, why five years?
You want xenomorphs?
‘Cause this is how you get xenomorphs….
😀
https://aliens.fandom.com/wiki/Xenomorph