Comment by xkcd-sucks
4 years ago
The "dual use" paper this is commenting on is the clickbait equivalent of "encryption is for pedos", and maybe Derek's "not too surprising" is code for "Science editors are not discerning enough".
Like, this is the whole point of pharmacology: Predicting the biological interactions of chemicals (what they do to biological targets, how potent), and their ancillary physical properties (solubility, volatility, stability etc). For example,
Optimizing for mu-opioid agonist activity gives you super potent painkillers, drugs of abuse, and that stuff Russia gassed a theater with to knock out / kill hostages and kidnappers (i.e. fentanyl analogues)
Optimizing for inhibition of various proteases might give you chemotherapy drugs with nasty side effects, or stuff with nasty side effects and no known therapeutic use (i.e. ricin)
Optimizing for acetylcholinesterase inhibitor activity will turn up nasty poisons which could be purposed as "nerve agents" or "pesticides"
Optimizing for 5HT2a activity will give compounds that are great for mapping receptor locations in brains, which are also drugs of abuse, and which are also lethal to humans in small doses.
And the "predicted compounds not included in the training set" thing is just table stakes for any predictive model!
> 5HT2a
You sure you don’t mean 5HT2b?
I mean, anything can be toxic with enough dose, but the b-subtype agonists seem a lot more toxic than the a-subtype agonists.
(Fun fact: 6-APB, a “research chemical” recreational substance became an actual research chemical because of it had better 5HT2b selectivity than what was previously used in lab research)
Was thinking of halogenated NBOMe series - observed in humans to have a pretty narrow therapeutic index re: death, cheapish synth, can be vaporized
But yeah 2b could be worse. Or many other targets as well
Funny thing, optimizing "research chemicals" for (1) uncontrolled synthetic pathway and (2) potency is common to Institutional, Druggie, and Terrorist researchers. None of them want to go through the bureaucracy for controlled substances and potency is good for [better controlled experiments / smaller quantities to transport / more killing power]
researchers will really care about selectivity, but potency can help with the amount of paperwork for sure (and cut synth costs!)