A lot of pharmaceutical companies have abandoned these programs simply because they’re not as profitable, even if they’re very important in terms of public health. Many pharmaceutical companies grew frustrated after 1st and 2nd generation approaches returned the same compounds as “hits,” or the drug failed once tested in vivo, which poured a lot of money into results that turned out to be dead ends. Current approaches are more sophisticated and targeted, but it’s a lot harder to find antibiotics that haven’t been found yet since all the “easier” ones have already been found. These more sophisticated approaches are more expensive. Antibiotics are also a one-time deal where the patient stops taking them as soon as the infection is gone, which isn’t as profitable as more long-term medications which required continued use.
Nice presentation! You said that not enough tests were done to determine if the MGO is bacteriostatic or bactericidal. What tests would you do to determine this and what do those mean.
Given the time, we would run more time-kill assays. Unfortunately we were only able to run two plates with this particular experiment, and we wouldn’t want to draw conclusions from such a small sample size. Time-kill assays look at what our compound does to the Salmonella over time, and if it the bacteria is able to eventually grow back after the same sample previously exposed to the compound is moved to a new well with fresh media. If the absorbances increase after re-plating, that indicates that the drug is bacteriostatic, meaning that it inhibits the growth of the bacteria. Since only growth is inhibited, after removing the exposed bacteria from the compound and giving it fresh media, it should be able to grow back given time. A bactericidal drug directly kills bacteria, so the absorbance wouldn’t change because the compound did some irreversible damage to the bacteria so that they are all dead anyways by the time they are transferred to a new well.
At this point in our research it’s hard to tell how MGO would function that far down in the drug discovery process, but it has been showing very promising results thus far. We would need more experiments run looking at things like the stability of our compound in order to determine if it could be effectively mass-produced, and other aspects which medicinal chemistry experts might be able to improve by manipulating its structure slightly. Manuka honey itself (which MGO comes from) is very expensive, so that’s definitely another hurdle in terms of drug development on the way to mass production.
Why have so many pharmaceutical companies abandoned their drug discovery programs?
A lot of pharmaceutical companies have abandoned these programs simply because they’re not as profitable, even if they’re very important in terms of public health. Many pharmaceutical companies grew frustrated after 1st and 2nd generation approaches returned the same compounds as “hits,” or the drug failed once tested in vivo, which poured a lot of money into results that turned out to be dead ends. Current approaches are more sophisticated and targeted, but it’s a lot harder to find antibiotics that haven’t been found yet since all the “easier” ones have already been found. These more sophisticated approaches are more expensive. Antibiotics are also a one-time deal where the patient stops taking them as soon as the infection is gone, which isn’t as profitable as more long-term medications which required continued use.
Nice presentation! You said that not enough tests were done to determine if the MGO is bacteriostatic or bactericidal. What tests would you do to determine this and what do those mean.
Given the time, we would run more time-kill assays. Unfortunately we were only able to run two plates with this particular experiment, and we wouldn’t want to draw conclusions from such a small sample size. Time-kill assays look at what our compound does to the Salmonella over time, and if it the bacteria is able to eventually grow back after the same sample previously exposed to the compound is moved to a new well with fresh media. If the absorbances increase after re-plating, that indicates that the drug is bacteriostatic, meaning that it inhibits the growth of the bacteria. Since only growth is inhibited, after removing the exposed bacteria from the compound and giving it fresh media, it should be able to grow back given time. A bactericidal drug directly kills bacteria, so the absorbance wouldn’t change because the compound did some irreversible damage to the bacteria so that they are all dead anyways by the time they are transferred to a new well.
Would MGO be an effective drug for mass production?
At this point in our research it’s hard to tell how MGO would function that far down in the drug discovery process, but it has been showing very promising results thus far. We would need more experiments run looking at things like the stability of our compound in order to determine if it could be effectively mass-produced, and other aspects which medicinal chemistry experts might be able to improve by manipulating its structure slightly. Manuka honey itself (which MGO comes from) is very expensive, so that’s definitely another hurdle in terms of drug development on the way to mass production.