Question: Have you ever tested your work out on a cancer patient and if so was it safe. if not how far do you think you are away from that stage?

Lizzard O'Day answered on 21 Jun 2011:

hey great question- I have not. There are all kinds of rules/regulations/safety precautions that you have to go thru before a drug ever gets into people. Most of my work is called “pre-clinical” aka before it hits the clinic- we optimize things as best we can and do animal testing.

If things look good in animal models you can then move on to phase 1 studies (try out the drug on healthy volunteers), then it’s onto phase 2 (patients testing for effectiveness/side effects), finally phase 3 testing (again you administer the drug to patients and you verify effectiveness & monitor long term effects). The whole process takes on average at least ~10+ years. There’s all kinds of efforts now to speed up this process and it’s something I am heavily involved with. So no drugs by me yet but I am working on a little something something 😉