Tech Transfer

Guests: Steve Castle is a professor of chemistry and associate director of the Simmons Center for Cancer Research at BYU Mike Alder, director of BYU’s Technology Transfer segment Many of the drugs approved by the FDA to treat various conditions work, but only to a certain extent. For example, there is a certain medication used to treat people with HIV/AIDS that has only a very short “shelf-life” in the body. As a result, it has to be injected twice daily in very large amounts. Needless to say, many patients prefer another treatment, if it’s available, and generally it’s used only on patients who don’t respond well to other HIV/AIDS drugs. The question is, why does the drug degrade so quickly in the body? Well that, has to do with the fact that the drug is a peptide and peptides are rapidly chewed up by enzymes in the body. BYU chemistry professor Steve Castle has come up with a new way to slow down that process and potentially create more effective drugs for lots of diseases.