Historical Factors At Play
As a biology teacher, I taught the story of the discovery and development of antibiotics, starting, of course, with Fleming’s discovery of the mold Penicillium notatum’s ability to suppress Staphylococcus bacterial cultures on nutrient agar plates. (The species is now known as P. chrysogenum.) This discovery was by propitious happenstance. It occurred because inoculated culture plates had remained un-cleaned for a period, while Fleming was off or doing other things.
Wonderfully, he happened to note Staphylococcus-free zones around the Penicillium growths. Penicillium is a genus of rather common molds. Penicillium spores commonly circulate in the air and drop onto nutrient agar plates, contaminating them. This contamination lead, eventually, to the saving of hundreds of millions of lives — including my mother, a nursing student in WWII. She acquired a bacterial infection that quickly became very serious. The hospital she was being trained at had just received its first shipment of the new penicillin. She was the first there to be given an injected dose, and within a few days of treatment, she was cured. I would never have been without that event (before my birth).
But, as the referenced story states, it was a long and convoluted time and process before penicillin came to the market—for reasons innate to the sociology of modern medicine, and which are still at play with Anavex.
Fleming made his overt, physical discovery of the antibiotic effects of Penicillium chrysogenum in September of 1928. Penicillin didn’t come to practical use until 1942, a 14-year time-to-market period.
Not long after his discovery, Fleming presented a paper, telling of his observations. The professional bacteriology community paid no attention; a mere curiosity of contamination by stray mold spores.
He went on to extract penicillin molecules from the mold, and use them to suppress bacterial infections in mice. He either failed to adequately present this new information to the biology profession, or, they simply paid no attention. Penicillin went virtually un-noticed for a decade. Commercial production didn’t occur until 1941, after intense lab work here in the US, prompted by the onset of WWII. Infected battle wounds are major causes of wartime lethality. Allied use of penicillin was a not-small factor in the war effort.
How does this apply to Anavex’s sigma-1 receptor agonists? We hope, not so much; that a) the molecules would be quickly and accurately recognized as revolutionary medical game-changers (even more so, I contend, than antibiotics in the last century), and b) clinical treatment applications will be forthcoming, treating a diversity of human (and animal?) diseases as soon as possible, without any 14-year lead time.
With the final appearance and availability of penicillin, it quickly came into use. Understandably. Those untreated simply died in a week or so.
But such was not the acceptance of the germ theory itself. Semmelweiss, Pasteur, Lister, et al. showed conclusively that bacteria, “germs,” cause infections. But it took almost a half century for conventional medical science to fully accept the germ theory. Disease was “known” to be caused by bad and re-breathed air, not microscopic organisms in air and water.
In short, medical people have never been quick to re-think what they know and believe about the etiology and treatment of diseases. They know and believe mostly what the medical ancients wrote, and what their med school professors taught, two groups of the most intelligent and knowledgeable humans in all of history.
So, in our case, a team of scientists come along and say (a bit more forcefully than Fleming) that they’ve found a class of novel (new) molecules that restore health to diseased neurons, by formerly unknown mechanisms of action. Of course, the medical community knows better. Alzheimer’s is caused by amyloid and tau protein waste accumulations, and every one of the many attempts to therapeutically clear those has failed. This new Anavex company, we all know, simply can’t have the answer. The known science is better than that.
In the case of penicillin, it was the exigencies of WWII that finally prompted its commercial development and application. In our case, with Anavex, might it be the ever-expanding populations of us Baby Boomers aging into profuse geriatric CNS disease vulnerability?
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