Their molecule, sahaquine, reduces the viability and invasiveness of glioblastoma under controlled conditions, which is obviously great, and led them to conclude in 2018 that "evaluation of sahaquine in combination with other drugs merit further investigations in patient-derived organoids, and eventually in humans."
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41420-018-0103-0
In short, for now their discovery works in Petri dishes, it has yet to be tested on mice and obviously man, which under normal circumstances takes between 10 and 15 years (and sadly the very vast majority of treatments that look great in labs don't pass the mice trial). So we still have to wait about 7-12 years to hear more about it!
Yup, need to study the potential cocktail effects with other molecules to determine the actual viability in a living body, and then experiment on your mice to see if they don't drop dead right away, then you need to study side effects: worth it or not, how to minimise them etc., then sometimes test on bigger animals (swine, monkeys), and then present your research to receive the authorisation to make the first experimental tests on humans, recruit your first cohort, that has to be small just in case there are unexpected side effects, to not destroy too many lives at a time basically, and then up the scale -there are typically 3 trial phases. All of this sprinkled with articles and conferences to present the result of your work, so that peers can 1. check you're not bullshitting, 2. discuss if you're not making a mistake that invalidates it and how to improve things, and 3. get inspired to develop the technique faster.
Just last year my dad was diagnosed and he’s had two removals. Glio is really aggressive and destructive...... thank you guys. This gives me some hope that maybe I’ll have more time with him
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41420-018-0103-0
In short, for now their discovery works in Petri dishes, it has yet to be tested on mice and obviously man, which under normal circumstances takes between 10 and 15 years (and sadly the very vast majority of treatments that look great in labs don't pass the mice trial). So we still have to wait about 7-12 years to hear more about it!