Jun 9, 2026 08:42 PM
More "duh" territory for anyone who has individually had repeated success with ___ in ways that don't package into a placebo context. But still realizes the futility (and recklessness?) of an outlier promoting it for either the general public or the statistically engendered and commercially deified "average person". (Sans the financial opportunism of the successful mountebank, who in this instance would unwittingly and perversely reap from an item actually effective under contingent circumstances.)
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Some drugs ‘fail’ because of unrealistic testing conditions
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1131347
INTRO: A drug once dismissed as ineffective suddenly worked — when scientists tested it under more realistic conditions that mimic the human body.
In this surprising new discovery, Northwestern University scientists uncovered a hidden rule of drug behavior. A medicine’s effectiveness can change dramatically depending on the conditions inside our cells.
In the new study, scientists found that two fundamental features of human biology — body temperature and calcium levels inside cells — can change how drugs interact with their targets, sometimes even flipping a drug’s effect entirely.
The findings could help explain why some drug candidates look promising in early lab tests but fail later in development. They also could point toward a smarter way to design more effective medicines with fewer unwanted side effects.
The study was published in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology.
“Drugs don’t act in isolation,” said Northwestern’s Wei Lü, who co-led the study with longtime collaborator Juan Du. “They act within the physiological environment of the cell. By incorporating temperature and calcium into our experiments, we uncovered drug activities that were completely invisible before.”
Lü and Du are professors of molecular biosciences at Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, professors of pharmacology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and members of Northwestern’s Chemistry of Life Processes Institute. Jinhong Hu, a postdoctoral fellow in the Du and Lü labs, is the study’s first author... (MORE - no ads)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Some drugs ‘fail’ because of unrealistic testing conditions
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1131347
INTRO: A drug once dismissed as ineffective suddenly worked — when scientists tested it under more realistic conditions that mimic the human body.
In this surprising new discovery, Northwestern University scientists uncovered a hidden rule of drug behavior. A medicine’s effectiveness can change dramatically depending on the conditions inside our cells.
In the new study, scientists found that two fundamental features of human biology — body temperature and calcium levels inside cells — can change how drugs interact with their targets, sometimes even flipping a drug’s effect entirely.
The findings could help explain why some drug candidates look promising in early lab tests but fail later in development. They also could point toward a smarter way to design more effective medicines with fewer unwanted side effects.
The study was published in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology.
“Drugs don’t act in isolation,” said Northwestern’s Wei Lü, who co-led the study with longtime collaborator Juan Du. “They act within the physiological environment of the cell. By incorporating temperature and calcium into our experiments, we uncovered drug activities that were completely invisible before.”
Lü and Du are professors of molecular biosciences at Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, professors of pharmacology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and members of Northwestern’s Chemistry of Life Processes Institute. Jinhong Hu, a postdoctoral fellow in the Du and Lü labs, is the study’s first author... (MORE - no ads)