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klevertree

1,039 karma · joined March 26, 2019

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klevertree··on Sleep apnea pill shows striking success in large clinical trial
Wrote about this in the context of repurposing, which is a pet interest of mine: https://trevorklee.substack.com/p/another-entry-for-the-repu...
klevertree··on Heart disease deaths worldwide linked to chemical widely used in plastics
We're still prototyping and testing, but you'll probably have to eat it twice a day to get complete coverage. It needs to be in the gut at the same time as the plasticizer to have any effect.
klevertree··on Heart disease deaths worldwide linked to chemical widely used in plastics
Not a bad idea for your health, but it won't trap plasticizers. We're modifying the beta glucan to have many tiny, "sticky" pores to trap the chemicals in the gut, so they go out with the rest of the beta glucan. Pure beta glucan, whether from oats or barley, won't have much effect.
klevertree··on Heart disease deaths worldwide linked to chemical widely used in plastics
Reports like this on the dangers of DEHP is exactly why I started work on NeutraOat (https://neutraoat.com/), a modified oat fiber supplement designed to trap plasticizers in your gut before they can get into your bloodstream. The idea is to give people an easy, safe way to avoid absorbing plasticizers that you've ingested.

Link above has a form to sign up for the mailing list. I also have a Substack post summarizing what we know about the dangers of plasticizers (https://trevorklee.substack.com/p/the-evidence-on-plasticize...) .

klevertree··on Pharmacokinetics: Drug development's broken stair
Yes, what do you think the pk trials and liver experiments would involve if not people who have a variety of phenotypes?
klevertree··on Pharmacokinetics: Drug development's broken stair
Author here. Thanks! I'm pretty sure most of the negative effects of SSRIs were discovered in phase 2 trials, though. Pk trials aren't usually powered to find adverse effects in subpopulations like teenage patients. Same thing with GLP-1 agonists and their effects on addictions (which I think were actually discovered post approval).

That being said, we'd still have to do dose escalation studies for toxicology even if we had great pbpk models. Not denying that.

klevertree··on Pharmacokinetics: Drug development's broken stair
Author here. As someone who works in pharma, organ on a chip models are not even close to being relevant to providing accurate PK curves for oral absorption. The state of the art is trying to make it work for cutaneous absorption and that's still not great/commercially useful.

My whole point is that there needs to be way more open data on pharmacokinetics. That's the only way we're going to solve this.

klevertree··on Pharmacokinetics: Drug development's broken stair
Author here. That's not what I said. Please don't be a jerk on the Internet.
klevertree··on Pharmacokinetics: Drug development's broken stair
Cyclosporine and tacrolimus, if you look at the range in any of their pk trials you'll easily see 10 fold variability.
klevertree··on Pharmacokinetics: Drug development's broken stair
Author here. Enzyme polymorphisms are tricky and would require a whole different blog post. Some drugs they matter a lot for, some drugs they do not. I actually have not found any drugs with 10-fold variability that could be ascribed solely (or even mainly) to polymorphisms, although it doesn't seem impossible.
klevertree··on I'm making drugs for cats
Do you have any connections there, by any chance? Always looking to talk to more vets.
klevertree··on I'm making drugs for cats
The corporate attorney agreed not to require me to pay any of their invoices until I closed a seed round, while the patent attorney let me pay their invoices a full year after I received them. These sorts of arrangements are common with attorneys who work with startups.
klevertree··on I'm making drugs for cats
I'm sorry to hear about your calico. Stomatitis is really a terrible disease.
klevertree··on I'm making drugs for cats
Unfortunately, the reality of trying to cure animals is that sometimes you accidentally hurt animals. That's also the reality of trying to cure humans.

This is the exact same issue vets face when they perform surgery on your cat, and it's the exact same issue that surgeons face when they perform surgery on you. The difference is that vets don't have to pay tons of money for malpractice insurance in case they get sued by the owner, which is one of the big reasons why veterinary surgery is so much cheaper (i.e. affordable to ordinary people) than human surgery.

klevertree··on I'm making drugs for cats
Trying to cure a disease that gives cats such bad mouth sores that they sometimes can't even drink water isn't exactly "pushing crap".

We're trying to make it to profitability so we can get to the point where we can test the solution in humans who have neurodegeneration. When you're dealing with incredibly complex regulatory environments and millions of dollars in development costs, it's not always easy to make it from point A to point B. That's the point of this post.

klevertree··on Organ transplant patients may not get dementia
To add to what everyone else said: it's not just an immunosuppressant, it's an immunosuppressant with unpredictable, severe side effects. It's really interesting, and I hope to reformulate it to make it possible for healthy people to use, but you will cause severe damage to yourself if you self-administer.
klevertree··on Organ transplant patients may not get dementia
I thought it'd be too much in the weeds. The UTexas paper goes into their prescribing data and comes out with the conclusion that calcineurin inhibitors are the only common factor in their patients who don't get dementia.

Rapamycin also does not have any evidence of efficacy on neurodegeneration, while there's evidence for CNI on other forms of neurodegeneration.

klevertree··on Why can't we just give steroids to people with muscular dystrophy?
That's not muscular dystrophy. That's a motor neuron disease.
klevertree··on Why can't we just give steroids to people with muscular dystrophy?
Sorry, didn't mean that it was obvious scientifically. I meant obvious in terms of pharmaceutical progress. They built a mouse model to mimic muscular dystrophy and cured the mouse model of muscular dystrophy, which is why they felt confident spending their millions on human muscular dystrophy. Unfortunately, it was not a good model, in the same way that most most mouse models are not good models.
klevertree··on Why can't we just give steroids to people with muscular dystrophy?
In this analogy, I meant to indicate all the wooden beams were rotten to the core, in the same way that muscles die in Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Quadrupling up the beams just means that you've spent a lot more resources on something that's fundamentally unusable.
klevertree··on Ask HN: Who is looking for a co-founder? (July 2021)
Highway Pharmaceuticals | looking for cofounder with PhD or Masters and love of the tedious parts of science| remote | Highway Pharmaceuticals is developing drugs for autoimmune conditions that aren't treated well by biologics. We currently have a lead compound and an indication and are headed towards an IND. Currently self-funded, but there's enough money for you to get a salary!
klevertree··on What mRNA is good for, and what it maybe isn’t
No, that substitution helps, but it doesn't solve the problem. You're still introducing foreign mRNA into the body, and the body still has millions of years of evolution telling it that foreign mRNA = invader .
klevertree··on What mRNA is good for, and what it maybe isn’t
I wrote a long essay about the same topic and came to similar conclusions as Derek Lowe: https://trevorklee.com/are-mrna-therapies-the-future-of-phar...

One thing that I'd like to emphasize is how unbelievably tiny mRNA therapeutics have to be. It's probably around 30 mg, and it's hard to do it more than once every few weeks, at least judging by siRNA therapeutics (which have similar immune issues).

30 mg is really tiny. It's hard to come up with a meaningful therapeutic in such a small amount of material. People have been hyping up self-replicating mRNA as a solution, but that's still in its infancy, and has its own problems regarding the "compilers"/polymerases that need to be packaged with it.

klevertree··on Show HN: Anki alternative with integrated notes and import/export
Huh, not entirely sure what you mean. When you say readily available and updateable, what are you hoping to accomplish?
klevertree··on Show HN: Anki alternative with integrated notes and import/export
Anki has a lot of features and it's been around forever. It's tough to keep something like that smooth and sleek. But yeah, my original impetus for creating this was loving the idea of Anki, but having a really hard time sticking with it because of how clunky it is.
klevertree··on Show HN: Anki alternative with integrated notes and import/export
Nope! A lot of features Anki doesn't have. Try out the demo account and let me know what you think.
klevertree··on Show HN: Anki alternative with integrated notes and import/export
Well, it's an alternative for people who are looking for interesting, useful flashcard apps and found Anki limited or hard to use. Would you say Windows isn't an alternative for Linux?
klevertree··on Show HN: Anki alternative with integrated notes and import/export
It's not OSS, no. OSS is a tough business model for small SAAS.

And there are alternatives, but none of them work quite as well for the intended use case. It's possible to hack Anki for most of the functionality of 21st Night, but that gets tedious, especially for people who just want something that works out of the box.

klevertree··on Show HN: Anki alternative with integrated notes and import/export
Oh man, you are correct. Shoot. I don't know how I did that.
klevertree··on Show HN: Anki alternative with integrated notes and import/export
Thanks! Yeah, Remnote is also really cool and a great product.
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