This was a big news and surprise for me. The idea of crowdsourcing for drug trials is a new and goes against the pharmaceutical giants. What is everyone thinking? Where will this lead, cheaper drugs, better quality? Or the opposite?
"Transparency Life Sciences (TLS), along with Matthew Galsky, M.D., associate professor of medicine in the Division of Hematology/Oncology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, will be designing and conducting a pilot trial assessing the diabetes drug metformin as a potential treatment for prostate cancer. This collaboration will also test using crowdsourcing to obtain input to the design of the clinical protocol, and telemonitoring to replace most patient site visits. TLS will be partnering with AMC Health, a provider of telehealth services, to conduct the metformin study," reads the story published in GEN.
Now Metformin is probably the most recognized drug for treatment of diabetes in the world except for insulin and the most widely prescribed. If you take drugs for type 2 diabetes, chances are metformin is one of them. And in fact, now the British scientists from the University of Liverpool have discovered how this drug actually works by allowing insulin to do a better job. Explaining the research, EmaxHealth reporter Deborah Mitchell "translates" Metformin's role in simpler words.
Using a special mouse model, the researchers found that metformin reduces fat molecules in the liver, and this action in turn allows the hormone insulin to do a better job of taking sugar from the blood. This discovery is important for several reasons.
Back to crowd-sourcing: Dr. Matthew Galsky hopes that crowd-sourcing will make cancer research accessible to more patients who wouldn't have access under normal circumstances.
In fact, Transparency Life Science has been doing this for more than a year, reports MedCity. And using Metformin for treatment of Prostate Cancer is its latest project.
I wonder how crowd-sourcing and drug development worlds mix together. How about you?