Anavex Life Sciences Corp (AVXL)

[falconer66a]

Pure brilliance, actually.

...let's assume for purposes of discussion that both 2-73 and 1066 will be megablockbuster drugs. How could you account for one tiny company coming up with two such pharmaceuticals? The odds against just one are unreal.

This can be “accounted for” quite easily. None of the other pharmaceuticals, large or small, have discovered or developed the drugs Anavex has. That’s because the others deal in what they know; what their scientists are specialists in. They don’t go off into the molecular hinterlands playing around with strange new molecules. Intelligently (and profitably) they stick with what they know or see.

And they haven’t known or seen anything useful at the sigma-1 receptor protein. First, its innate functions and mechanisms of action were until recently unknown, unrecognized. Just a nice little protein lodged between the mitochondrion and the attached endoplasmic reticulum. Should anyone want to look around (inside any cell, but particularly in neurons), there are hundreds of distinct proteins. No one at any of the other pharmaceuticals had any reason to scrutinize the sigma-1 receptor protein.

And, even if they did, they had no molecules that could in any usefully way affect it.

So, as with most of everything else useful in medical science, with Anavex there has been “new science,” things that at the start appear pretty nebulous and without probable application. Every field of science experiences this, but particularly medicine.

Classically, take the “germ theory,” the strange and weird notion (back then) that some sort of invisible “microbes” are the actual cause of many diseases. These “germs” (disease-producers) can move into organisms and produce all sorts of diseases. Of course, medical science utterly rejected this, for decades. Pasteur, Lister, and a few others finally won the argument, but only after “the real professionals” for decades rejected the scientific evidence.

Check the grief and push-back Semmelwiess got for decades trying to keep microbes from mothers during delivery:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

Scientists don’t like to have their bodies of knowledge discarded, or even questioned. The germ theory did that. In physics, Einstein disrupted things profoundly.

(Currently, I’m working with a university research team in my particular area of ecological science, where we are, similar to Anavex, developing very new ecological techniques and protocols that will solve a major ecological problem. Implementation will take a few more years; in the mean time we’ve had to convince intelligent sceptics that our stuff really works. “Hard to believe!” New ecological science; being rejected for now. Later, broad applications and understandings.)

So, why and how Anavex science? Because a few people had the vision to see that their unique, proprietary molecules could produce wonderful therapeutic (even prophylactic) outcomes. All of that went against what was known about, say, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases. Before, no one knew how the sigma-1 receptor protein actually worked, or what it caused to happen in cells. Now, Anavex knows, and has in-house molecules that modulate and promote the multiple functions of the sigma-1 receptor.

There will be blow-back (understood), but I’ll make the claim now: In time, a Nobel Prize or two will be awarded to those at Anavex who have been instrumental in bring forth Anavex science. In the last century antibiotics changed medicine profoundly. In the 21st century, Anavex will make probably even greater improvements — all because a few individuals were not restrained by conventional understandings or practice. Like all great scientists, they could look beyond what is known and accepted, seeing new things that needed to be studied and perfected.

Why Anavex? Scientific brilliance, unconstrained by conventional knowledge or perspective.
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