• Question: What kind of experiments do you perform in order to find cures?

    Asked by Lilyoflilyington to Carolyn, Peter, Richard, Sara, Siana on 17 Nov 2015. This question was also asked by elsieexo.
    • Photo: Richard Unwin

      Richard Unwin answered on 17 Nov 2015:

      Hi Lily,
      Another great question – and it’s a long process, so I’ll give you an example of some work we are doing at the moment..
      First we’ll find a ‘target’ – something that happens in disease that is not in healthy people and that we thing may be important in how the disease develops. In our case we found that in people with heart disease caused by diabetes, the levels of copper in the body are not as they should be.

      Next, we find a chemical that we think can ‘hit’ that target. In our case we were lucky – there are a couple of genetic conditions where copper is affected and we tried a medicine which is used for that.

      Next we test the medicine in an animal which has the disease of interest (in our case diabetes) and has the same ‘target’ (copper is also affected in the heart of a diabetic rat). We check that the new medicine does no harm, and see if it can reverse some aspects of the disease (in our case copper levels and the size of the heart, which is bigger in people/animals with diabetes as it has to work harder).

      Finally, you get to test the new medicine in people as part of a ‘clinical trial’. We’ve done a small trial for our copper drug and it starts to ‘shrink’ the heart of people with diabetes back towards normal. We now need to do a bigger trial with more people and for longer to show how much effect it can have and, if we shows it works, it can then be given to patients.
      We’ve a video explaining clinical trial on our YouTube page https://www.youtube.com/user/cadetmanchester

    • Photo: Siana Jones

      Siana Jones answered on 17 Nov 2015:

      Hi Lilly, that’s pretty comprehensive answer from Rich. I’ll just add that, as well as cures we can do experiments to look for preventative therapy and symptomatic treatment (i.e. not a cure but a way of dealing with the symptoms).

      For diseases such as diabetes type 2, prevention is much better than a cure. We know that in the early stages of diabetes T2, exercise can reverse the process leading to severe disease. Experiments have been done in people who have early signs of diabetes to see what happens when they do a lot of exercise. This would be compared with a ‘control’ group of similar people who had not done the exercise.

      This kind of experiment is quite fun because you deal with results from real people and, if your sample is big enough, you can sometimes immediately apply the results to clinical populations or design a more specific study that might consider what kind of exercise (walking, running, pingpong??) is best as a therapeutic target.

Comments