Some of you have been asking about the May 4th 2010
announcement by GlaxoSmithKline that they were
suspending a clinical trial of their resveratrol drug
because of safety concerns.
Some of the articles went so far to say that people
should be cautious about taking resveratrol supplements
until these safety issues had been resolved.
Let me make this perfectly clear!
The "resveratrol" drug referred to in these articles is
not resveratrol itself!
But let's start at the beginning.
The story started when scientists at Harvard screened
over 500,000 chemicals to find which would be most
effective at turning on anti-aging genes.
They were looking for a drug that they could patent and
sell to a drug company for big bucks - not a naturally
occurring botanical nutrient.
But what they found was that resveratrol, a nutrient
that is found naturally in red wine, was the most
effective compound out of those 500,000 that they
screened at turning on the anti-aging genes.
That was great news for those of you who are using
resveratrol supplements, but it was bad news for them
because they couldn't patent it and, therefore,
couldn't sell it to a drug company.
But all was not lost. There is a time-tested process
for dealing with this dilemma.
You just make a chemically modified derivative of the
natural compound and, if it works, you patent the
chemical derivative and sell it to a drug company.
So that's what the scientists at Harvard did. They made
a chemical derivative of resveratrol called SRT501,
showed that it also turned on the anti-aging genes,
patented it and sold it to Sirtris Pharmaceuticals for
$500 million. Sirtris, in turn, sold it to
GlaxoSmithKline for $720 million.
As I said, this is a frequently used process. Many
successful drugs have been obtained this way, but the
process is also fraught with perils.
The problem is that the chemically modified derivative
is often not metabolized in the same way as the
original and frequently can be toxic in unexpected
ways.
In fact, the failure rate for this process is quite
high. Most of the chemical derivatives fail during
clinical trials for one reason or another. It is only
on a very rare occasion that these chemically modified
derivatives make it through clinical trials and become
a successful drug.
Thus, it is perhaps not surprising that SRT501
displayed unexpected toxicity that caused
GlaxoSmithKline to halt clinical trials of the drug.
But, SRT501 is not resveratrol and the toxicities of
this drug have nothing to do with resveratrol.
Resveratrol is a completely natural nutrient found in
grapes, red wine and other foods. SRT501 is a man-made
chemical derivative of resveratrol.
Sometimes it's not nice to fool with Mother Nature!
To Your Health!
Dr. Stephen G Chantey
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