Team:Nanjing high school/Implementation
Implementation
End Users
Studies have shown that an Alzheimer’s patient is born
every three seconds. As of 2019, more than 52 million people worldwide are living with Alzheimer’s disease.
The patients in China achieved a quarter of the total. In the same year, an expert in Alzheimer’s research
in the United States said,” They're maybe more people who go undiagnosed. Nowadays millions of people
worldwide are suffered from the pain of Neurodegenerative diseases (NIH) and currently, no one in the world
can completely cure these kinds of diseases, all we can do is slow down the process.
So our product is targeting those patients who suffer from the disease related to
the microglia Inflammation, such as Alzheimer’s.
Product Theory
We screened out the most effective PPM1A enzymatic
activator compound V through phosphatase enzyme activity assay with pNPP as the substrate. Then, we use qPCR
assay and proved the inhibitive effect of compound 5 against PPM1A. As a result, compound 5 was demonstrated
as a PPM1A activator and its anti-inflammatory effect was determined. We will investigate the regulation of
PPM1A against inflammation and the diseases related to inflammation in future scientific research work. Our
drug will be the first to actually fight diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s that are caused by
inflammation. This is unprecedented in the global pharmaceutical market!
Product Commercialization
*Creative Commons licensed image from Bing
Taking a small pill could save the patients from the pain of forgetting. Taking a
small pill could warm up a family that has been hurt before. In addition, our team will try to get this drug
to Medicare. This means that the cost of the drug will be much lower. In this way, the financial burdens of
the patients' families are greatly reduced. Our products should be extraordinarily profitable if we
successfully invented them, as there is no substitute in the market to cure those diseases.
Our market is tremendous, and the number of consumers is
also increasing. In addition, problems caused by Neurodegenerative diseases have become severer as
technology becomes more developed and the life expectancy becomes longer, especially nowadays the whole
world is facing the problem of the aging population. For example, until 2015, 26% of Japan’s population is
over 65 years old, which means a quarter of the population is elder (Paola Scommegna). National Institute of
Health predicted that there will be 1.6 billion elders worldwide when we reach 2050. Elders are assumed to
be the group of people who are most likely to suffer a special neurodegenerative disease: Alzheimer’s
disease. According to the website called Alzheimer’s news today, there is approximately 44 million patient
in worldwide who have Alzheimer’s diseases. In the future, the problem of an aging population will become
severer and the need for our product will grow in the same step.
After Drug R & D is completed, we are ready to
commercialize the drug according to the business plan we wrote. Specifically, we will cooperate with major
hospitals and pharmacies. Then we can sell our medicines online and offline through these institutions.
Furthermore, we will also plan to add our drugs to the medical insurance list to reduce the financial burden
of our stakeholders, and more people can use our medicines and increase the sales of drugs.
Expert Consultant
Moreover, after we interviewed professor Lu, we have
determined our stakeholders and changed the position of our product, because we were planning to do a health
product that is helpful for people who are suffering from Neuroinflammation. However, according to professor
Lu, she said that producing health products straight is impossible since the rules made by the State Food
and Drug Administration are strict. This will cause people to ignore the side effects of pharmaceutical
products. Thus, we changed our product from a health product into medicine. Meanwhile, the age range of our
stakeholders is mainly seniors and middle-aged because people in such age tend to have a high rate of
getting Neuroinflammation. As a team, we have come up with several ways to promote our product.
According to this plan, we decided to focus on popular
science education in the preliminary work. We divide science education into two types. The first is to
conduct online publicity activities. We plan to create an official account to increase our publicity. By
writing popular science articles every day and our work experience, letting more people know that we are
developing a drug that can cure a variety of neurodegenerative diseases with few side effects. Another way
is to conduct offline science popularization. Here are two potential offline activities. The first is to
conduct charity sales in shopping malls. For this reason, we have customized many gifts with our team logo
and put these items in blind boxes for sale. At the same time, we will also invite passers-by to fill out a
questionnaire to collect data. Considering how to attract more people to participate in the event, we made
roll-up banners and posters. The versatile students in our team also prepared singing and dancing
activities. The second way of offline activities is in the community. We will invite elderly people to watch
our stage show with knowledge of popular science. And we will also have fun games with the residents and
give them free food like eggs and cooking oil. Through the above distributions, I think we will surely let
more people know about our drugs.
Safety Concern
Cytotoxicity should be considered in our future plan.Will the potential
implementation of our project involve any cytotoxicity issues? If so, how to tackle these issues? We consider that it is
essential for us to verify such issues in our future development. We can not put our project in practice until we fully
understand the potential cytotoxicity issues that our project may render.
Future Plan
In the future, we will continue to improve the performance
of drugs, further reduce the side effects of drugs and achieve less dose and greater effect at the same
time. With the aggravation of global aging, our drugs will become more popular. At this time, we will strive
to develop derivatives centered on neuron target drugs, which can be used to prevent and cure diseases at
different stages in the early, middle, and late stages. In addition to form and efficiency, we will
vigorously promote the export sales of neuron targets, expand its international influence and help more
patients suffering from neurodegenerative diseases around the world.
Reference:
1) Xu, Ling et al. “Microglia-Mediated Inflammation and Neurodegenerative Disease.”
Molecular neurobiology vol. 53,10 (2016): 6709-6715. doi:10.1007/s12035-015-9593-4
2) Voet, Sofie et al. “Microglia in Central Nervous System Inflammation and
Multiple Sclerosis Pathology.” Trends in molecular medicine vol. 25,2 (2019): 112-123.
doi:10.1016/j.molmed.2018.11.005