Vervolg
The notion that systems in the body express themselves in complex ways can be captured in a single term Cohen is fond of using, "pleiotropy," the notion that single gene, or any gene's protein, the "products" it makes, can have multiple, seemingly unrelated effects in the body.
For years, Cohen has been pursuing an approach that exploits pleiotropy, called "pleotherapy," which finds drugs to "re-purpose" that have shown efficacy in other diseases to fight new diseases for which they have not yet been approved. Often, the key is a combination of drugs. A Fortune Magazine article a year ago described his philosophy of drug development thusly: "My feeling is that with 50 drugs, we can treat everything."
Cohen's Pharnext used artificial intelligence, trained on large quantities of data, to arrive at a set of three drugs, baclofen, naltrexone, and sorbitol, that in combination with one another may be able to treat Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, or "CMT," a rare neurological disorder for which no cure has been found, what's known as an orphaned disease.
That drug, called "PXT3003," is currently going through a second "Phase III" clinical trial to confirm the results from the first trial, said Cohen. The publication process for that is "extremely long but is going pretty well," said Cohen. A second drug is currently garnering "encouraging" results in Phase II trials for treatment of Alzheimer's.
The current work on COVID-19 has been posted on a pre-print server and bears the daunting title "Focusing on the Unfolded Protein Response and Autophagy Related Pathways to Reposition Common Approved Drugs against COVID-19." It is a fascinating piece of detective work.
Van ZDNET.com
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