Human Trials
Scientists, Investors, And Patients In The Quest For A Cure
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Over fifty million people suffer from some form of autoimmune disease-multiple sclerosis, arthritis, lupus, and other afflictions in which the body attacks itself-none of them with a lasting cure. Susan Quinn has investigated the worlds where new autoimmune drugs are being developed: the research labs, the drug-company boardrooms, and the clinics where patients become "subjects" in the search for new medicines and treatments. Her exciting story is one of real people: fiercely competing scientists, ambitious venture capitalists, and, above all, anxious, sick human beings. She takes the reader inside these otherwise closed worlds, into the lead investigator's diaries, the tense closed-door meetings with investors, and the hopeful or heart-rending encounters in doctor's offices. Hers is the archetypal story of all medical research: the roller-coaster trip from the lab bench to the medicine cabinet, in which only a very few new drugs and treatments survive. Susan Quinn, author of the acclaimed biography Marie Curie, catches the hopes, triumphs, and crushing failures, the greed and the idealism in these dramatic human trials.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This book is to experimental drug trials what Randy Shilts's And the Band Played On was to the AIDS epidemic. In resonant journalistic prose, Quinn (A Mind of Her Own: The Life of Karen Horney; Marie Curie: A Life) manages to capture the day-by-day human drama of high-stakes drug testing on patients with multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis, everyday people who gamble with their lives to find a cure. Her case study of winner-take-all medicine is AutoImmune, a pharmaceutical company risking millions on one doctor's big idea, with a slim chance of exponential returns should a new drug be brought successfully to market. Quinn argues that failure is progress, in this field at least, where even crushing defeat can broaden understanding. This gives some idea of the extreme emotional highs and lows in this book. Quinn, whose work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine and Atlantic Monthly, knows how to tell this story: from the lab and the conference room; over coffee in the kitchen of an MS patient's modest split-level; in the clinic waiting room on any given weekday. AutoImmune's big idea, called oral tolerance, is similar to the ancient idea that feeding a small bit of a poison can build tolerance to that poison. In this case, the idea is to build up immunity by administering small doses of myelin and collagen, the proteins attacked in MS and rheumatoid arthritis, respectively There are plenty of make-or-break moments in this book, made all the more poignant by Quinn's considerable talents as a biographer, which lend depth of character to the doctors and patients who grace these pages.
