= Such Stupid Things =

It's flattering when things you do at work pop up in the news, which is why I've been closely following this story about clinical drug trial in England which went horribly, freakishly awry. The quotes from a patient given a placebo - though medically fascinating - read like something out of a horror movie:

"First they began tearing their shirts off complaining of fever, then some screamed that their heads felt like they were going to explode."

The drug in quesiton is an antibody designed to bind to CD-28, a protein on the surface of T-cells involved in the activation of an immune response. The native ligand for CD-28 is a protein found on macrophages and B-cells called B7-2, which is a protein I expressed and purified in lab just a couple weeks ago. This morbid story is my PhD in action... maybe if I were a little better at my job we'd understand what went wrong with these people.

It's easy to expect Constant Gardener-style foul-play on the part of the drug companies when something like this happens. But there's always a possibility that tragic, unexpected consequences will arise in clinical trials, even if the laws are followed perfectly, (though it looks like the might not have been). But then, everything I've read cites how non-toxic the drug was in test animals... I'm no big-city drug designer, but it seems that if you were developing an antibody against a human protein you'd be especially wary of animal models. since your drug, by design, won't bind nearly as strongly (if at all) to functionally similar but structurally different proteins from mice, rabbits, etc. But the scientists working on the project must have thought of that already... right?