It was another bitterly cold day and the cold weather is set to last through the weekend. The wind went back round to east on Wednesday night. In its first Greenhouse Gas Bulletin the United Nations World Meteorology Organisation is warning that greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have reached record highs and are still climbing. Carbon dioxide was half a percent higher in 2004 than in 2003. But the agency seemed to be concerned about methane which has risen dramatically over the past two centuries. But for me this was just another typical day.
Up with the sun before seven. To town at eight to warm up in Jempson’s Coffee House. To Rye Public Library at 0930 for an hour of free computer time and internet access. Then to PC Hut for the rest of the working day. Back to the boat by six. Light the fire. Prepare my evening meal. Read by candlelight. Bed at 2200. The only deviation from the norm was fire-lighting by kindling from Rye DIY for £2.15. Aah…the joy of smoke-free fire-lighting…and a non-carcinogenic environment from six to half past six each evening. The wooden window frames I normally saw and chop up seem to be impregnated with something nasty…quite apart from the lead-based white paint sending me ga-ga.
We live in a Golden Age so do not mock my typical day. During the 1990s I worked closely with David Neame. A year ago David was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Every year thirty thousand men in Britain develop the illness and a third of them die. David is very thin and gaunt and no longer comes into Rye. This week he started on yet another round of chemotherapy. The doctors give him three years to live. What he would not give for my typical day!
It is hard to know what to think about cancer and the billions of pounds poured into cancer research. The epidemiology studies seem a complete waste of time and money. How many times can you run statistics through a computer and write about the results? Commercial research by the big drug companies is skewed because of the need to end up with a pill or an injection. There is also the worrying thought that chemotherapy and radiotherapy may be implanting more tumours than they cure. But alternative medicine doesn’t seem to work. So what do you do when you are told you have cancer? And what advice do you give when someone near and dear to you gets cancer?
Recent research at the University of California has found that chillies contain the substance capsaicin which triggers human prostate cancer cells to undergo programmed cell death in culture as well as slowing the development of prostate tumours formed by those human cell lines grown in mouse models. This offers up the hope that capsaicin can be used in drugs targeting prostate cancers. But this sort of announcement from the Cancer Business hits the newspapers several times a month. How should we react? Chris Hiley, head of policy and research at Britain’s Prostate Cancer Charity for instance while welcoming the report remarked that the high intake of chillies has been linked with stomach cancers in the populations of India and Mexico. There go the epidemiologists again.
New chemicals discovered on the laboratory bench have around a 1 in 10000 chance of making it onto the pharmacy shelves…and only then at a cost of well over half a billion pounds. Commercial clinical development is in three stages once it reaches beyond mice and monkeys to people. In Phase One the company developing the drug tries the new product on a dozen or so healthy volunteers. This stage is a million pound gamble and 90% fail to make it through to Phase Two where hundreds of human guinea pigs are brought in for testing. Failure rates are relatively low in Phase Two with three out of four new drugs making it through to the final phase. But Phase Two does not come cheap…allow ten million pounds. And so to the distribution testing phase and more failed products. Industry in general expects only one in fifty product ideas to make it through R & D to market. Pretty lousy odds...but not bad compared with the Drug Companies.
This week reports have been dribbling in about a drug called Parexel which has gone disastrously wrong during Phase One testing. Monoclonal antibodies (MCABs) were discovered at Cambridge University in the 1970s and won Nobel prizes in 1984 for César Milstein and George Köhler. MCABs play merry hell with the immune system. So the theory was that they could cure leukaemia…once ‘we’ learned how to control them.
So in 2000 a group of specialist immunobiologists from the University of Würzburg set up a company called TeGenero to bring the Super MAB drug TGN 1412 to market. They raised six million pounds of venture capital in 2002 from the American investment bank Bear Stearns and from HBM Bioventures founded by Henri Meier, a former Finance Director at Roche Holdings. Everything looked hunky-dory…until this week. Completely unexpectedly the immune systems of the dozen Phase One volunteers started to go crazy. They are not expected to live. Suddenly getting £2000 to take part in the clinical studies no longer seems such a good deal.
I was on call at PC Hut all day on Job 631. There was a slight hiccup in mid-afternoon when the client discovered two hundred lost English words in her bottom drawer. But otherwise everything went smoothly and I will be invoicing the 25% upfront part of our fee on Monday morning once we know whether or not we are doing the Russian website.
