In early March I spent a week on Tenerife – doing a bit of enthnopharmacology research, relaxing a bit once and a while. (Easy to do if you have only slow wireless internet access) A note in a local newspaper caught my eye: reports of prehistoric aboriginal habitation in a ravine where archeologists had been working for eight months, digging and (good practice!) milking the locals for useful facts. But it was not this field work that had yielded the exciting part of the news. The best finds were made in the archives of the local archeological museum: a series of extensive but unpublished manuscripts on these exact cave sites, written by the museum’s director decades ago and resting in forgotten paper files until his modern colleagues wanted to check on some minor background facts. It seems as if a good part of their research had been preempted, but it had passed from knowledge even though it was the inheritance of the same institution that had commissioned the present dig. Now the “new” insights are hailed as a breakthrough in the prehistory of the Canary Islands. (See here)
Want an example closer to pharmacology? Easy. Two days ago there came the news that Jeffrey Bada, a chemist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California and a former student of Stanley Miller (who in 1953, together with Harold Urey, had performed the famous electrical discharge experiment that demonstrated how the building blocks of life might have been created on primordial Earth) had made an equally belated discovery. Bada had retrieved a dusty cardboard box with samples from Miller’s 1958 second series of experiments where sulfide had been added to the “primordial soup.” The samples contained, among other interesting compounds, sulfur-containing aminoacids. (See here.) Big deal? Yes, because until now it had been believed that these modified Miller-Urey experiments had generated neither methionine nor cysteine, and that therefore the “lightning-in-primordial-soup” hypothesis had a hole in it. It hadn’t, but we didn’t know it because until 2011 nobody had bothered to take a second look at decade-old samples.
Looking back and seeing what has already been done can yield invaluable information, and not only from unpublished manuscripts or forgotten biochemical samples. It is frequently forgotten (or conveniently pushed aside) that we are constantly loosing scientific data that have never been properly mined, and will be beyond retrieval if we don’t do something about it. Example? Everybody is talking about how global warming makes the polar caps shrink, but how old are our oldest satellite images showing what the extent of the icecaps was before that discussion started – lets say, in the mid-1960s? The early Nimbus satellites were in polar orbits at that time, but only their low-resolution data had been processed. The raw data were recorded and deep-archived on magnetic tape that has physically and magnetically decayed since then, and for which drives are no longer available. It took an almost unprecedented effort (“almost” because NASA had done something similar for the Lunar Orbiter images before) to rescue and mine these data. Since 2010 we know how exactly the Arctic and Antarctic icecaps looked like from orbit in 1966, in multispectral high-resolution as originally recorded. (See here) But much other early satellite data has been irretrievably lost to bit rot or – believe it or not – because NASA engineers had to reuse the stored media, taped over the old high-res-data, and kept only low-resolution versions.
Sadly, our attitude towards old pharmacological data is not too different. Everybody wants to push ahead, and wants “to go where nobody had been before.” We generate petabytes of new data in our Bio-IT efforts, and current technology allows us not only to store but also to mine them. But there seems to be little glory in archival work which concerns itself with what has already been done (and even documented) decades ago.
There is hope. As the dug discovery pipelines dry up and pharma companies are increasingly desperate to discover what could become their major cash generators a decade from now, the concept of drug repurposing is on the rise. In a nutshell, you look at known compounds (marketed or discontinued from development) and investigate, with the entire battery of cutting-edge wetlab and silicon tools, what unknown potentials these molecules may carry beyond what they had originally been developed for. That’s true knowledge discovery for you, and the good news is that it is (relatively) cheap compared to ab initio discovery strategies. I’m somewhat proud of having argued this approach since the mid-1990s.
This blog has discussed issues related to drug repurposing several times before, but here is a summary:
* H.M. Pharma Consultancy’s Pharma’s market and technology intelligence report,
“ Drug Repositioning: Extracting Added Value from Prior R&D Investments ” (July 2010):
“ Drug Repositioning: Extracting Added Value from Prior R&D Investments ” (July 2010):
* Here you can register for membership in our Drug Reurposing- Repositioning discussion group on LinkedIn (you need to be a LinkedIn member):
And the blog notice on the group’s foundation is here.
H.M. Pharma Consultancy has amassed expertise in drug repositioning during the past decade, and we would be pleased to serve you.
Please contact us at office@hmpharmacon.com , or call at +43 664 101 0121 (Central European Time = GMT+1 hr.)