If You're Happy and You Know it Clap Your Hands
Greetings and saluations my good folks. How I've missed you guys, I apologize in advance if this post is a tad long and has spelling mistakes in it. I thought I’d give everyone a bit of an update as to what I’ve been up to. Well I’ve been working hard at a course that’s been dealing with Medicine and Biotechnology. Pretty interesting stuff but it required me to go to lunch with people and have questions prepared for them so that I sounded quazi intelligent. The conversations were good because I got to get some insight into the pharmaceutical world and got to converse with some important people with jobs I might one day like to have. The wraps were’nt to shabby either.
On top of this I had to complete a project. As I’ve mentioned earlier we do most of our work in groups and most of our courses involve us coming up with a biotechnology product that will function from a scientific perspective as well as from a business one. This time around we went with a product that would down regulate the levels of this thing called P glycoprotein. This is a protein that gets over expressed in cancer cells. Now you’re probably scratching your heads wondering what the heck does that mean? Well the function of this protein is to pump things such as drugs out of your cells. The end result is that you have lots of these pumps pumping out chemotherapy agents such as doxorubicin. This makes chemotherapy ineffective, in the case of liver cancer most people die in 5 years. So we designed something called an siRNA which gets a complex called RISC to chop up RNA which stops these pumps from being proteins and hence working (do you folks know about DNA, RNA and protein? Say yes if you don’t ever want to hear me describe what they are). We conjugated it to cholesterol to target it to the liver so you don’t get bad side effects and WHAM we have a product. Much more complicated than that, 29 pages more complicated in fact but I don’t want to bore my adoring public (yes I mean you nikki)
As I mentioned in my previous post I also had to apply to jobs and submit cover letters. I would like to thank everyone for your advice and I made sure to follow it. I did in fact get an interview for the position I had my heart set on and I’m proud to admit that I now have a job for my co-op placement and it’s with one of the worlds largest pharmaceutical companies. I couldn’t have asked for more and I can’t wait to start in January.
Now while this is going on the date my group was supposed to present our seminar on was moved up by two weeks. This meant that I had my exam on the same day as I had my seminar (given to about 150 people and those who cared to watch online). The exam went fairly well as did the seminar. The topic of conversation is one that I suggested, Lifestyle drugs. Now to give you some background lifestyle drugs are drugs that 1) either address an issue that is not directly health related, for example hair loss, or erectile dysfunction or 2) address issues that can be addressed by changing your lifestyle for example obesity. Now this is getting fairly long and I want to comment on all my favourite bloggers sites so I’ll end here and pick up on discussing obesity later but as always I have a question for you folks. Do you think that pharmaceutical companies should be investing money to solve problems such as erectile dysfunction, obesity, hair loss etc? Keep in mind the market is about 8 billion dollars.
posted by Molecular Turtle @ 4:02 PM
11 Comments:
Welcome back, Turtle! Your question is an interesting one. I don't know enough about it to give you a good answer, though. I would have to know the following: are the pharmaceutical companies investing money on these "lifestyle drugs" at the expense of doing something else worthwhile? Meaning, are certain diseases being neglected because the industry is spending time trying to cure baldness?
It's a tough question. As you may know, we have a horrible problem down here in the US with people not having adequate health care. If you don't have a job with health benefits, or millions of your own dollars, you are basically screwed. I don't know if the pharmaceutical company question has much bearing on that, but I see providing all citizens with at least a minimum standard of health care to be the most important issue.
Aside from that, everyone knows that pharmaceutical companies are for-profit enterprises, and they have to spend their money on whatever is going to make them money. To the extent that they receive help from government, they should be doing work to help humanity, though.
I didn't really give you an answer, except to explain the quandary.
My vote: YES
Of course I think they should be investing money into those problems and any problems for that matter...I think any problems solutions are helpful in the long run and make a lot of people happy...
just checking in again...(and I wanted to share this new photo with you...haha)
Welcome back, Congrats on the new job. I would say yes to some of the lifestlye drugs and no to others. Yes to things such as hair loss but in terms of a pill to fix obesity no, if there is just a magic pill to fix people will eat whatver they want and camp out on the couch becuase they know once they get a certain weight that they can just take this magic pill. I think it will make our society lazier than it already is.
Hi there,
Thanks for commenting on my blog. How did you come across my site anyways? Do you know one of my friends? Christina? Mark? Doug?
Just wondering!
Cool Blog...I like it!
Take care,
Annie!
As for your question:
"Do you think that pharmaceutical companies should be investing money to solve problems such as erectile dysfunction, obesity, hair loss etc?"
Well from a psychology student's perspective...sadly I know that we as a society are "image saturated." What do you think pharmaceutical companies should be investing in otherwise? Most of society's problems can be solved without pharmaceuticals and I believe that they are there to satisfy these "types of needs" only.
Annie.
Congratulations on the job my friend! You did us proud!
Congratulations!
As for the question: I agree with some of the above posters. More should be developed for life-threatening diseases, not "lifestyle" drugs. It's more important that some illnesses be eradicated than a bald man restore his self-confidence.
I am duly impressed by your success with sounding quasi-intelligent. Every time I attempt this particular feat (prepared questions and all) something goes dreadfully, soul-shatteringly wrong.
I would like to comment on the rest of your post, but once people start saying things like "P glycoprotein" my brain implodes. My science-y friends have learned to just clean up the gray matter while continuing the discussion.
Congrats on the new job.
Right up my neck of the woods...question wise and post-wise.
But before I get too far, thanks for the post about my writing. I do enjoy it; and yes, the post was all me (except the painting). And the photography.
Also, congrats on the job! Wow! Super.
Okay, so cool about the p-glycoprotein pump. And glad you congutated it to cholesterol since it is pretty bad on the heart other as it is (even with the pumps that get it out of the cells). That is actually what caused my 10 yr old patient to die. So next task needs to be something that does something similar (keeps it away from the heart maybe?) in Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. That will be more difficult given the distribution of those cell.
And on the lifestyle drugs. I disagree that drugs that treat obesity is a lifestyle drug. Obesity is one of the most costly health problems in this country. Diabetes, tons of ortho problems, heart problems, liver problems, emotional problems, etc, etc. So drugs for obesity are a step in the right direction...although the real problem is more lifestyle CHANGE so we don't need drugs to fix that we mess up ourselves. And drugs with unknown long-term side-effects at that.
Baldness and ED, that's cool I guess. Lots of money that could maybe be better spent worldwide on the HIV or TB epidemics, but that's how the global and financial cookie crumbles.
I tell you, someday, whem I'm in charge of the world! Someday.
CP - Pharma usually has tons of drugs in the pipeline with lifestyle drugs being the minority. It should be said that drugs treating problems of the third world are often neglected but there are some companies that are trying to develop a malaria vaccine.
S. Good points. Obesity is classified as a lifestyle drug due to there being non pharma treatments that are as effective if not more so than drugs.
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