I’m tempted to talk about how stupid the cuts to the National Institutes of Health’s funding are, but let’s just go straight to the point (even if the research relevant to this post was paid for pre-sequester.)

So: there’s a drug long approved for treating HIV that they knew had interesting characteristics, they just didn’t know what all else it might be applicable to.

And now they know at least one new thing.

Thirty million Americans. That’s how many they expect to have dry macular degeneration within the next five years, thirty million people going slowly blind and there was nothing they could do to stop it.

Till now. AZT and its newer, easier forms can be used off-label right now and they hope for testing to begin soon for this to become an approved use.  Ebola may turn out to be another and if so, they want to know. And they don’t have to spend hundreds of millions to find out safe dosage levels, whether humans can tolerate it at all, etc, etc., since that’s all been done long since.

AZT was first tested not for AIDS but as a proposed cancer treatment, which it failed at. When you do medical research you never learn just the thing you set out to learn. There’s always more to see.

(Like this, for instance. I mean, who would want to miss out on that little moment?)