| General Fiction posted September 15, 2024 | Chapters: |
...36 37 -38- 39... 
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Brian begins creating his new drug
A chapter in the book DUEL with the DEVIL
DUEL with the DEVIL - Chapter 38
by Jim Wile
| Background A brilliant young chemist creates a new painkilling drug with unknown benefits and pitfalls. |
Recap of Chapter 37: Brian feels he is ready to break ties with Detry Pharmaceutical and set out on his own to build his own laboratory at home and work on his new drug. He has a heart-to-heart talk with Julia about it because it will be necessary for her to support the couple while he does this, plus a lot of their savings will go to the construction of the lab. She believes in him and is willing to take the risk with him to give him this opportunity.
Brian is overwhelmed by her faith in him. He writes up his resignation letter and begins planning his new lab.
Chapter 38
April, 2020
My laboratory was up and running for several months by early April. It was fairly state-of-the-art, although the larger pieces of equipment I bought were used and available at a discount. The three biggest pieces of equipment were the gas chromatograph, the mass spectrometer, and the electron microscope, which together set me back $300,000. Reconfiguration of the unfinished attic into a working lab was another $150,000. Chemicals and supplies were about $50,000, and other miscellaneous equipment totaled another $50,000. All told, around $550,000 to set up and equip my lab. Annual expenses to run the equipment would be roughly $100,000.
We had the money to spend for all of this, and Julia never batted an eye, even though most of our savings came from her earnings. How incredibly lucky I was to have a wife who had that much faith in me to risk a large portion of our net worth in a single “bleeding edge” pharmaceutical product! I’d better not screw this up.
Before going on, perhaps I should explain what my idea was for the new drug. Not interested in the science? Skip this part and know that what I produced at first was only half the story, as shown by what happened to me when I started taking the drug.
What always intrigued me was the dentist’s complete blunting of pain when he gives you a shot of Novocain or lidocaine before drilling into a tooth. You don’t get high, but it does an excellent job of blunting the pain.
Lidocaine in pill form has been tried for back pain, but the problem is that it must go through the digestive system, where the blood picks it up and spreads it through the entire body instead of targeting just the area in pain, weakening its effect. To compensate, attempts to increase the dose cause unwanted side effects, like nausea. Bottom line is: you can get some relief for it, but not enough for severe pain.
The mechanism that lidocaine employs to blunt pain signals, though, is an intriguing one. It works by blocking the sodium channels present in nerve cells. Think of a sodium channel as a pipe through which electrical signals pass. Since pain signals travel to the brain via the electrical impulses, blocking these pipes will block the pain signals from reaching the brain, and you won’t feel the pain.
My job then was to create a drug that could be administered in pill or capsule form that would be much stronger than lidocaine that would employ a specialized delivery system to target only the areas in pain. I would be using nanoparticles, which was a cutting-edge approach at this time.
With this drug, those pesky addiction-causing endorphins shouldn’t be produced. Sodium channel blocking was a totally different method of pain control than the method used by opioids. That would mean no getting high from the drug. This was the plan, but as you know, something went wrong, and I will describe that little glitch later.
I just had my first real breakthrough with the drug, and Julia was with me at the time. I’m glad she was, but the reason for her being there was not something that we were especially happy about.
We were now in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, and much economic activity was shut down. That included concert performances. Thus, Julia was out of a job, and we had no idea for how long that would be. The only money coming in was royalties from her record sales as well as the little extra she was able to earn by teaching a few students via Zoom.
It also meant that she would be home with me for the foreseeable future. That was perhaps the only good thing about the pandemic.
One morning she came upstairs to watch what I was doing in the lab. Recently I had begun bombarding nerve cells extracted from rats with my current drug sample and watching them under the electron microscope to observe the mechanism of the blocking or blunting of the sodium channels.
Julia said, “It looks like your drug is finding its way to the heads of the channels in each nerve and causing them to swell and to shut off the flow of ions. They can’t seem to get through now.”
“You’re right. That’s what it looks like. There are two practices at play here: the nanoparticle portion of the drug targets the right places, and the analgesic part causes them to swell shut, kind of like when the turbinates in your nose swell when you’re congested, and you can hardly breathe through your nose. You know what, Jules? One of the things I haven’t done yet is to name this drug. Want to brainstorm some names with me? I want the name to reflect both aspects: the targeting and the blunting.”
“How about Seeknswell?” suggested Julia.
“Well, that mentions the two parts, but it’s a little amateurish-sounding. What about Dupractica? Or maybe bipractica?”
“Getting warmer.”
“I’ll try it in Greek now. ‘Di’ means two, and ‘praxis’ means practice, as opposed to ‘theoria’ which is theory. How about Dipraxis… or Dipraxa? Two practices.”
Julia said, “I kind of like that one. It has a very druggy-sounding name, but why did you switch to Greek?”
“Most pharmaceuticals use Greek words as the basis of their names. I don’t know why; it’s just sort of traditional. That’s it then: Dipraxa.”
“Is that how the drug companies name their new drugs—the way we just did?”
“Well, sure. We had a whole department of folks at Detry who did nothing all day but sit around shouting out possible drug names. How do you think they came up with Bevacizumab or Sildenafil? People just shouting shit out to see what sounds good. That second one is Viagra, by the way. I think they named Sildenafil after this horny elf in a graphic novel who goes around with a hardon all day.”
We laughed about that, but we had a name for my drug: Dipraxa.
I continued to tweak the drug for some time. Originally, it was too good at stopping the flow of pain signals. The electron microscope revealed that it cut off close to 100 percent of the flow of electrons. That was too much.
There are a very few individuals who have a condition called congenital insensitivity to pain, or CIP, who experience no pain at all. This can be a dangerous condition, though, because pain is the body’s way of signaling you that something is wrong and inspiring you to take immediate action to stop it. I thought level-1 pain would be perfectly acceptable for people who have experienced much higher degrees. Thus, my efforts were to make the drug slightly less efficient in causing the swelling of the sodium channels to occur.
The testing of Dipraxa went on for months as I continually refined it until it structurally performed the way I intended. It was hard, time-consuming work, and I often lost track of time and worked until the wee hours of the morning.
It was not a smooth process, and progress was incremental, often with two steps forward and one step back, but it steadily trended upward, and I loved it—even with the many failures. They say Thomas Edison tried a thousand different materials for lightbulb filaments before he found the right one. He didn’t see these tests as failures, but only as new information. Good attitude, Tom.
I also loved how Julia would come up from time to time to help out with the data collection and input into the analysis software. I greatly appreciated her help, plus it was just nice having her around all the time rather than out on tour at least half the year.
I was at the point now where I had seen what I needed to see with the instrumentation. It was at this time that I filed a Composition of Matter Patent with the US Patent and Trademark Office to assure the exclusive rights to my formula for at least 20 years. The big question was, did it actually relieve pain? It was now time to measure that with animal trials and side-effect assessment.
 Recognized |
Brian Kendrick: The narrator of the story. At the beginning of the story, he is 12 years old and in 6th grade in Kernersville, North Carolina. The story traces his life into his 30s.
Julia Kendrick: Brian's wife whom he met at rehab when they were 16. She becomes a premier violinist.
Francine (Fran) Kendrick: Brian's older sister. She is 18 at the beginning of the story and goes to junior college, where she studies law enforcement.
Rafael Ortiz (Raffi): Youth therapy group leader at the rehab facility.
Robert Entwistle: Julia's father.
Dr. Marie Schmidt: Julia's mother.
Mike Pekarsky: Fran's boyfriend who she met on her Caribbean cruise.
Daniel Molebatsi: Brian's undergrad college roommate. He is from Botswana and is a business major.
Dr. Paul Rieke: Brian's organic chemistry professor.
Kimiko Yamada (Kimi): Brian's organic chemistry lab partner. She is from Japan and also resides in his and Daniel's dorm.
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