MS Treatment That Resets Immune System Shows Promise In Safety Trial
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/261536.php
I mentioned earlier about some work using nanoparticles for work attempting to reset the immune system to stop attacking self. Well this article talks about an approach using the patient’s own white blood cells, but mentions that the nanoparticles might be a better approach and it appears to be successful.
It is nice to see this stuff move out of the lab, too bad it takes so long. Still, there are many cases where rushing has resulted in costly failure, so I fully support the intent of how things are done (the intent is often violated by the highest bidder, though).
As a case in point from my personal experience… Years ago (too many now to count) I worked for a period at a company that tested chemicals on animals (I worked in the area that prepared the compounds, though that was in the building with the dogs; sure all animals stink, but the dogs were the worst (and the non-stop barking!)). Many of the studies were multi-generational and would last 2-3 years. The studies would generally start with an ‘acute’ test which would look at the toxic level so that long-term studies could be done. One company, though, was so sure that their compound was safe they wanted to save on time and run the studies in parallel. Our compounding area was divided into the feed section (mostly) for the long-term studies and the not-feed section for the (mostly) short-term studies and I was in the latter. Because we were working with unknown chemicals we wore full body suites and respirators (quite uncomfortable!), just in case. Well, there are generally four groups in each study. The no-dose, or control group, then low, medium and high dose. So, a week into a 2-3 year long study we got a complaint: why did we keep sending all this food for this study? We investigated and it turns out that, on the first day of the 2-3 year multi-generational study _all_ the animals in the high dose died, the second day all in the medium dose and the third day, every single one in the low dose croaked. Good thing we assumed everything was deadly, since that one turned out to be! So, the moral of this story is: animal testing really does save human lives. Just because _most_ of the chemicals tested are innocuous doesn’t mean that _all_ of them are!
