David Hoffman has written an article for the New Yorker titled "Going Viral: The Pentagon takes on a new enemy: swine flu." The article is behind a subscription wall, and I have no intent on subscribing just to get this one article, but if the tone of the article is what I think it is, it's going to make me upset. The short teaser at the link suggests that the article centers on the Defense Threat Reduction Agency's (DTRA) Transformational Medical Technologies Initiative (TMTI), in which it stumbled upon an opportunity to assist in developing a vaccine medical countermeasure for the swine flu virus - much like the proverbial blind hog finding an acorn in the forest.
In May of 2009, [Dr. Darrell] Galloway [director of DTRA's Chem-Bio directorate] asked Patrick Iversen, a scientist at AVI BioPharma who specialized in antisense technology, to help T.M.T.I. develop the drug. Animal testing showed that Iversen’s antisense compound dramatically lowered levels of swine flu in infected ferrets. By April 2010, swine-flu virus had infected between fifteen and thirty per cent of people in the U.S., but it was not as lethal as many officials had feared it would be. As a result, neither Galloway nor Callahan got the call to start mass production.
Now for a few little facts. TMTI wasn't supposed to be looking at swine flu, since as you know, there is this other federal agency called DHHS that addresses public health issues. But hey, good on DTRA, they saw an opportunity to help, and using defense dollars that were supposed to be allocated toward "broadspectrum medical countermeasures" that would protect military personnel from biological warfare agents, they took on the challenge. Ends up it wasn't really necessary, but hey, kudos for helping with the big win. But let's not overlook the dangerous flaws in this initiative.
Yet when the Obama Administration unveiled a new strategy for responding faster and more effectively to bioterrorism, in August, it called for many of the innovations and goals that Galloway had set for T.M.T.I. The Defense Department decided to make T.M.T.I. a permanent program, and the Pentagon issued a formal order that emerging infectious diseases are a proper target for military research.
Okay, point one, Galloway didn't set the TMTI goals, that was hand-crafted by a few OSD acquisition officials above his level. And they were not good goals. Congress took $250 million away from Galloway for lack of executing all his funds. Point two, TMTI became a permanent program NOT because it was successful - it wasn't - but because the current OSD acquisition officials think that medical countermeasures are Teh Coolest Rage, and it shows how proactive they are in beating DHHS to the punch in addressing public health challenges. And when said officials issued a formal memorandum saying that emerging infectious diseases are a "proper target for military research," it didn't go into detail about stripping other CB defense programs of all their cash to broaden the focus away from militarily-significant biological warfare agents to pandemic flu. But that happened anyway.
Mr. Hoffman notes:
In 2006, the Pentagon ordered an unusual five-year research initiative to counter germs being used as weapons of war or terror, and assigned Galloway to launch it. Instead of targeting pathogens one by one, the initiative would seek to invent therapeutic drugs and vaccines that could counter multiple germs. They would also develop new processes that could be used to quickly create drugs and vaccines to fight previously unknown pathogens. The effort became known as the Transformational Medical Technologies Initiative (T.M.T.I.). Galloway faced huge obstacles. Bringing a new drug or vaccine from laboratory to market in the U.S. can take ten to fifteen years and cost more than a billion dollars.
Yeah, funny thing. As Bryan Bender can tell you, TMTI has already spent a billion dollars over five years, isn't going to bring a new drug to market within fifteen years of 2006, and has already given up on making a single drug that can counter multiple germs. But that's not going to stop DOD from opening wide the budget spigot for this failed initiative. As in its "rebuilding" efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, it's as if they think that you can fix systemic failures by throwing more money at it.
So why are we hailing this initiative as some kind of wonderful government action? Let DHHS handle the public health challenges. This insane philosophy that the US government ought to treat natural infectious diseases the same way as responding to a bioterrorism incident, and that DOD ought to lead this research, is going to just burn billions of dollars without even turning the discussion toward the correct policy solutions. I blame the scientific-technical elite who are driving the discussion.
HAA,THIS GUY DOES NOT KNOW WHAT HE IS TALKING ABOUT,UNDER AVI BIOPHARMA THIS WOULD BE A CURE NOT A VACCINE AND IT WILL WORK.
Posted by: GARY | 28 January 2011 at 09:31 AM
AVI Biopharma has been riding the idea that one can apply anti-sense RNA solutions to everything. It's not a new idea although AVI Biopharma tries to dress up their work as novel, a set apart from everyone else.
And the hazard with journalists, or other laymen, is that they think of these things as new and under-appreciated, that miraculous science or a new way of doing things is being ignored by the old establishment stodges, or that trivial experiments in rodents mean something.
The company has been around for a long time. It has never really produced anything. Without the war on terror it would probably be dead. However, since it's been so unsuccessful, the war on terror has afforded it an opportunity to make its revenue model dependent on bioterrorism research and the working for orphan drug status -- which is a way to get grants for developing stuff that never seems to pay off in any way.
If you look at its website, or various news releases, it has big plans for curing everything, from cancer to Duchenne to transplanted organ rejection to infectious disease with its wunderbar technology.
Well, good luck to that but science and advances in medicine don't work that way. The going is always tough and the belief in transformational magic wands isn't realistic. In fact one becomes skeptical the more one reads the descriptions because they describe a revolution in medicine seemingly just around the corner.
There's an argument to be made for funding high risk research. However, that justification is now a cliche as well as a crutch. And it's used by everybody with mediocre to worthless proposals.
Posted by: George Smith | 28 January 2011 at 12:15 PM