672 karma · joined December 26, 2009
Maybe the culprit truly is dirty oil based extraction of THC... but if so, that will remains a problem for as long as there is no regulation of the official market as well as an operating black market.
OTOH we may end up with a situation like we have in the world of muscle builder / hormone supplements where most people are fine but some users get really sick (e.g. deer hormones sold at regular stores causing severe kidney injury), but not enough of them get sick to get the CDC/FDA involved. I've seen those cases in the hospital and the patients are always confused as to how this could happen because they got the supplement from a vitamin store.
With respect to some of the European posters below who have been using vape products for years: I would not be surprised if there were health consequences to those devices that had not been identified in Europe. The US has one of the best disease identifying-apparatuses in the world (the Centers for Disease Control) and a tradition of surveillance and reporting that is unparalleled. If a substance is harmful to health, it's got a better chance of being found here than anywhere else.
1. It will have a chilling effect on physicians giving informal ("curbside") consults to colleagues. That leads to worse patient care overall. For instance if your doctor doesn't know what's up with you, he/she may not be able to curbside consult phone a colleague to get a 2nd opinion. This happens all the time in medicine and is one of the advantages of being at a medical center with lots of doctors: you can double check weird cases with your colleagues.
2. Direct admission to the inpatient ward are no longer common because outside physicians don't run hospitals anymore. Hospitals are run by teams who specialize in inpatient medicine -- and they almost always function best if the inpatient admission is preceded by an ED visit because the ED can rapidly get tests, imaging and collateral to figure out what's wrong—and if the problem needs inpatient management or not. Direct admissions, in bypassing this step, often put patients at risk by skipping the rapid information gathering process that the ED employs.
The "admitting privileges" they discuss in this article are a relatively meaningless and outdated practice in medicine today (with certain exceptions, such as obstetricians and some other surgeons).
If you can't access it then shoot me an email at ron gejman at gmail dot com and I'll send you the pdf.
But there are other strategies in development to help some patients with autoimmune disease. This is one of my favorite papers in that vein: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27365313
No CRISPR/Cas9 was used in this study.
We'll have to wait and see if any of the patients develop hematologic malignancies (blood cancers).
I predict we'll see dozens of papers like this in the next few years. Sickle cell and thalessemias are low hanging fruit.
So, let's say you need 20 female mice for an experiment (e.g. 4 groups of 5). That means that you need to have >40 offspring in order to get enough female offspring. That's at least 7 breeding pairs (assuming you're not harem breeding) and you've got to maintain them for 6-8 weeks until you can use them. That's >$1,000 in breeding costs before you get to the actual experiments.
We grow cells in what is essentially sugar water + some growth factors that we get from cow serum (b/c America has lots of cows). Google tissue culture 101 videos on youtube to get an idea of how it all works. You can't (and don't want) to inject the animals with all that fluid + protein (it can be liters), so you transfer the cells into tubes and spin them in a centrifuge (~300 x g). Spinning them will bring them to the bottom of the tube and they will form a pellet. The pellet sticks to the bottom as you literally dump the fluid out. Now you can resuspend the cells in a few microliters of a saline solution and inject them into the mice.
For example, cells growing in an incubator usually need to be at a density of 200k-1e6/ml so that they have enough nutrients and waste doesn't build up too quickly. For 5e6 cells, that would be 5-25ml of fluid, which is WAY too much to inject into a mouse, so you have to concentrate the cells into a much smaller volume before you can inject. I will typically inject mice with 100µl of fluid containing 5e6 cells.
In terms of injection, you can google subcutaneous injections in mice to see how it's done. It's the same as if you've ever had a tuberculosis skin test or a minor operation where they injected you with lidocaine locally (or what your dentist does). The cancer cells are injected into the space right under the skin.
I invite you to go visit a laboratory that works with rodent models for a few days and see if you still think this is true. I would love to be proven wrong, but in my experience animal experiments are as non-automatable as human clinical trials. As a simple example, in my PhD I spent months injecting mice with cancer cells, measuring the tumor outgrowth, then harvesting the tumors, grinding them up and sequencing them. You can see the schematics of some of those experiments in one of my manuscripts (https://elifesciences.org/articles/41090 -- free to access). Each one of those experiments relied on dozens of different techniques (from cloning to making viruses to culturing cells to animal husbandry), most of which are not easy to automate because they vary from experiment to experiment. For instance, just to grow the cells for injection into animals, you need to monitor plates of cells growing in a sealed 37º incubator, wash and re-feed them as necessary over a period of days to weeks. Then, on the day of injection, you need to wash and spin them down, resuspend in an injection solution, put them on ice, go down to the mouse house, shave the mice, anesthetize them and then inject them. You don't want too much time to elapse between when you prep the cells and when you inject them or they might die. At every step there are biosafety constraints that limit your movements and how you dispose of garbage which would be challenging to scale up to a totally automated system. Every different cell line/type you inject has different kind of growth requirements and idiosyncrasies in how they like to be handled. I suppose you could program machines to do this for one cell line, but it would be a monumentally difficult task to do it for every cell line and get good results. Then there's the matter of just handling the animals. I would love to see a machine that could do this (and maybe one day there will be) but for the moment you need training in how to carefully and safely grab mice, restrain them, inject them and so on.
The costs of maintaining mice is also much larger than it seems (perhaps compared to mice kept as pets). A major cost is the daily tasks associated with husbandry, like cleaning cages, sick checks, genotyping, etc. At least at my institute it was ~$1.50 per day per cage (up to 5 mice) in support costs, not including the ~$30-50 it costs to raise a wild-type mouse to the point where you could do the experiment (more for some genetically modified mice). An experiment with 500 mice (100 x 5 conditions) would cost you $15-20k, which would massively balloon the cost of research.
Finally, there are major ethical concerns with using more animals than necessary for any experiment. Animal work is carefully regulated by internal and external ethics committees and oversight of all ongoing experiments. The number of animals to be used for any given project must be justified with statistical analysis suggesting that you are using no more than necessary and will indeed be able to show the expected results. If you propose experiments using large numbers of animals you must have a good explanation for why you need such numbers.
Anyway, it's not really that simple or cheap to do animal experiments, especially at large scale.
But to address your specific question, generics are drugs that come onto the market all of the time without patent protection.
For every therapeutic target there are many chemical/biological solutions that can work. If an off-patent compound shows some effect in a pathway, a patentable variant can usually be made.
The "use case" here is people's lives. People's lives are messy. Blockchain doesn't solve that mess, it pretty much just makes it worse.
We should focus on using blockchain to solve "neater" problems like who owns what and who is contractually obligated to do what, etc. Those problems don't have edge cases that involve a parent who loses their memory or a kid who gets thrown out of his house.