The first round of calling up the drug company and the specialty pharmacy is over! Earlier this afternoon I injected myself with a monoclonal antibody that was brewed in Chinese hamster ovary cells. According to my doctor’s nurse, a hundred thousand people are clammoring to get this medicine. Do they need to sacrifice a new batch of Chinese hamsters every time they make more of this antibody? Or is there just some Chinese hamster cell line that keeps replicating in a lab, and they just keep feeding it? I’m hoping that blocking my CGRP receptors with this antibody is helpful for me. I’m optimistic because there is some sort of science thing linking the way this antibody works with the mechanism that’s believed to be behind the rescue medication that works really well.

Currently I am experiencing what I believe is the #1 most common side effect: It hurts where I stabbed myself with the needle. My diabetic colleague provided advice on better spots to stab yourself that don’t hurt as much.

In other news, the future is still hard to predict except when it isn’t. In the cases where our simple one-parameter model works, it works really, really well. Still haven’t been able to identify ahead of time when it is going to work. Also, secretly I know that all of my data demonstrates survivorship bias, so one of these days I need to get up close and personal with the database in order to reconstruct all of the points that don’t show up in the easy data. Let’s hope that these new antibodies that I’ve acquired will allow me to put in enough full days of work to figure this out soon.