IBM Watson fires its own cancer-fighting ‘moonshot’

Re:IBM Watson fires its own cancer-fighting ‘moonshot’ by samstave on Saturday October 19, 2013 @12:00AM (#6575280)

>Ultimately, my previous boss was bold enough to latch onto that and give it a shot - can we take this molecule that is the most potent of the group (but unfortunately cardiotoxic), delete the homologous oxygen atom and make something that still works and is less cardiotoxic?

And? Did it work?

ELI5 - how do you delete the oxygen atom? How is the new compound replicable at a scale where you have lots of it?

THanks - I am fascinated by this - but am completely ignorant. Thanks

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Re:IBM Watson fires its own cancer-fighting ‘moonshot’ by dnautics on Saturday October 19, 2013 @01:40PM (#6577125)

It worked well enough that I'm starting a nonprofit (http://indysci.org) in part to continue the work (by "previous boss", I mean, she quit her job as a professor - so the whole thing is the pharma equivalent of abandonware). It was 5 times less cardiotoxic by design, and not by design, it was 10 times more potent.

You delete the oxygen atom by doing something called mutasynthesis, if you want a better description email me, I'm literally going to the bank right now to open the account for the nonprofit:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=yonemoto+gerratana (click on "free PMC article")

It's scaleable since the hacked bacteria do all the heavy lifting.

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