Chronic inflammation is bad for your long term health and longevity. Inflammation as a system is pretty complex, but scientists are making good progress in understanding just how it all works - in painstaking detail. This opens the door for the existing drug development infrastructure and community to attempt to turn down inflammation in any number of ways; in theory, and as for early nanomedicine in cancer research, the attempts should become ever more directed, precise and lacking in side effects as the science advances.

At the moment, a number of groups are focusing on the biochemistry of cytokines such as tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNFa, cachexin or cachectin). Interfering in the operation of cytokines seems to be a promising method for controlling the inflammatory response. A few examples in development:

QR-433:

QR-443 is an all natural broad spectrum anti-inflammatory compound that is being concurrently studied as a drug for Rheumatoid Arthritis (under the designation QR-440) in humans and dogs. QR-443 has been shown in previous pre-clinical studies to inhibit the production of TNFa and IFN gamma

As yet unnamed:

Devgen scientists have discovered compounds that inhibit the secretion of specific hormones that are the primary cause of rheumatoid arthritis, an autoimmune disease that causes chronic inflammation of the joints. ... following encouraging results from studies in animals, one of its preclinical programs may show promise for the treatment of inflammatory diseases. ... A key competitive edge of the Devgen molecules is that they are small molecule drugs that can be orally administered. The current treatments are protein based therapeutics, applied by injection and are costly to produce. Hence, they are infrequently administered early in the development of the disease. ... Finding orally active TNFa inhibitors is a 'holy grail' in inflammation research as it may provide patients with convenient, cost effective and hence earlier treatment options in the development of these progressive diseases

Filter out the standard press release hype; the interesting point is that groups are working on these sorts of solutions. Many will fail, some will succeed. As knowledge grows and the tools become better, the solutions will also become better - and cheaper and more widely available. The direction here is towards ever more effective, precise and knowing control over our biochemistry, in this case to prevent an existing system from running out of control and shortening our lives.

Technorati tags: biotechnology, medical research

Posted by Reason at August 29, 2006 9:10 PM | TrackBack (1)