Avoid the cutting edge of tech/science?

Last weekend I woke on Sunday and pulled out the stem on my watch. I needed to update the time an hour forward. Most people don’t do that given their reliance on a cell phone or iWatch for telling time. But some things just work so well that they are hard to abandon – like my Timex watch (don’t we all remember, “it takes a licking and keeps on ticking”).

I tend to be an early adopter, which means I’ve owned a Rabbit AI device since the 2^nd or 3^rd batch was shipped – and unfortunately still haven’t figured out a use for it. So for critical activities or needs, I tend to stick with stuff that works.

One of my mentors when I was in high school and college was Herman Watson. He taught me a lot about innovation. One of his lessons focused on inventing vs. repurposing. I learned how efficient it was to rely on the work of others. I’m not talking about stealing or misappropriating, but rather, finding something that already exists to solve an important problem – and specifically a problem that the inventor or developer did not anticipate.

It's part of why I searched for an existing drug that can reverse Parkinson’s disease. Repurposed drugs can be developed faster and cheaper than trying to discover a brand-new drug. And that speed was important as I started this project to reverse my buddy Ivan’s Parkinson’s.

So I did not even think for a moment about reprograming cells, developing a gene therapy or editing someone’s DNA. These represent some of the coolest inventions over recent decades. But these are so new that we don’t know if they are safe – let alone effective – for chronic diseases exemplified by Parkinson’s. And they would certainly take too long to help Ivan.

Ever hear of a statin? What about those commercials for erectile dysfunction medicines? When was the last time you took an antibiotic or a blood pressure medicine? The most common drugs either target an enzyme that is primarily responsible for the body synthesizing a protein that affects a disease or that target the receptor where such a protein attaches to another cell to cause or prevent a disease. These are old-fashioned approaches that work and importantly, that we know how to develop to be safe and effective.

Predictability is an advantage when developing a new drug – and is relevant to how a drug works and how well we understand how to test that drug. We get that advantage with repurposed drugs that the cutting-edge stuff just doesn’t have, meaning the likelihood of success is higher and the time it takes to develop a drug is shorter. And that means that the return on investment can be better than with a newly invented drug.

So it’s fine that people like to talk about fancy science and cool tech leading to their breakthroughs. I believe such programs are likely to help our children. But if you have a disease now, particularly a degenerative one like Parkinson’s, you want something moving faster that will help you.

At Right Brain Bio, we believe we have just that in hand moving towards clinical trials.