Lulu

Hey, it's Lulu.

This week, I want to bring back an episode about scientists who look in the most unexpected place to find a brand new drug to treat a very tricky bug.

The bug is MRSA, that really nasty infection people sometimes get in hospitals.

And I don't want to give away the drug because that's sort of all the fun.

So I'm going to just pass you off to Jad, Robert, and little baby Latif from about a decade ago.

Here we go.

Rewind.

Hey, Lulu again with a quick update.

It has been almost a decade since we first aired this episode.

And since then, Christina and Freya have published several papers to show how this concoction works and why.

Now, Bald's eye salve is not quite ready to hit the drugstore shelves yet, but in 2022, it made it over a big hurdle for new drugs, phase one safety trials.

It was tested on healthy humans, so not already sick folks and not in open wounds, and the results were overall successful.

And Freya and her colleagues have a pretty good idea now of which chemicals in the medicine are the important ones so they can distill it down to its bacteria-fighting essence.

Potentially great news for all of us staying a little healthier using very old things.

But all this, you know, did leave me with one very important question for Christina, the Viking expert.

If we get further in clinical trials and this actually becomes, you know, a drug, who owns the patent?

Is it Mr. Bald or whoever from like a thousand years ago?

So we asked Christina, the Viking expert.

I don't know.

Anyway, Radiolab here for you, the hard-hitting medical questions, the hard-hitting patent questions.