Pillow Thoughts

Posted on 19 Dec 2013 @ 3:41am by Lieutenant Olsam Mott

1,034 words; about a 5 minute read

Mission: Episode 05 - Solstice
Location: Crecy-la-Chapelle, France, Earth
Timeline: MD 10 - 1520 hrs

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Dr. Olsam Mott was nestled amongst the myriad pillows populating the ledge of his large bay window, comfortably reviewing the case files from the Pasteur Institute on his own PADD from his own home in Crecy-la-Chapelle. The pillows were such an extraordinary, uncoordinated number of colors, shapes and sizes that one would be forgiven for thinking the blue Bolian was actually just another pillow in the bunch. He'd felt good about excusing himself from the rest of the research team earlier in the afternoon and taking the train back to his small village - the sterile research environment had started to make his skin crawl for some reason - and a cup of tea at his favorite place in the apartment was only serving to further heighten his already elevated mood.

Briefly, Olsam put the PADD down in his lap and leaned his head to the side, resting it against the window pane and enjoying the moment. The window was almost imperceptibly cooler to the touch, an amazing feat of engineering that managed to keep the outside world at bay more successfully with each passing year. He'd been disappointed that the windows didn't actually open and recalled that the landlord, a stuffy Parisian urbanite, had seemed completely baffled as to why anyone would want to open their windows. In his limited view windows should be an impassible portal to the outside world; anything else was just a hole in the wall in need of repair. By contrast, Olsam, with a joie de vivre surpassing that of even his very French landlord, just liked to inhale the sweet smells of the environment every once in awhile.

A beep on his PADD brought him out of his reverie. He located the source of the disruption: an irritatingly bureaucratic notification from Starfleet Personnel about regulation so-and-so related to his latest posting aboard the USS Galileo. He sighed and promised himself he would address it later before getting back to reading through the case files that had been provided to him by Dr. Alice D'Tries, project lead for the Inbriden drug development team at the Pasteur Institute.

In the face of virulent strains of killer pathogens, treatment-resistant illnesses and humanitarian disasters, difficulties in interspecies breeding seemed to fall low on Starfleet Medical's list of priorities and so research had been left largely in the hands of the private sector. The Pasteur Institute had an impressive track record on innovative drug research, and Olsam knew from checking with some colleagues that there was buzz about the new interspecies breeding drug based on initial rumors of its effectiveness. The excitement just seemed to add an additional layer of urgency to resolve the roadblocks presented in the clinical trials.

The background notes he'd read more than a week ago had filled him in on the basics of the medication, which sought to reduce unfavorable immune responses during pregnancy. There were some drugs already on the market that could be used on a species-by-species basis, but an across-the-board treatment was considered something of an holy grail among obstetricians. The case reviews were now giving him a look at the raw data from the clinical trials where the team began to run into unexpected drops in effectiveness in certain species. On a second PADD, he'd begun keeping his own notes on the research, including the species most affected and various observances about those particular case files.

Olsam closed out the case notes and closed his eyes, leaning his head against the window once again. His eyebrows were knitted in concentration. There was something unusual about the combination of affected species that was tugging at the back of his brain, but he couldn't quite piece it together. When he opened his eyes, it had begun to lightly snow outside his apartment but the doctor hardly noticed. Instead, on a hunch, he opened a view of the drug's chemical composition on his PADD. The three-dimensional rendering allowed him to move and manipulate the drug at will, right down the subatomic level.

Nearly an hour of scrutinizing the constituent molecules proved fruitless, and he finally became frustrated enough with inspecting the fine details to swipe a finger across the screen and zoom the view out until the drug's chemical rendering appeared smaller and smaller. Eventually it stopped with a white pill rotating in the middle of the screen, the drug's final form.

It was then that Olsam sat upright, suddenly struck by an idea. He scrambled for the other PADD and scrolled into the background information on the drug. One of the more curious aspects of the drug was that it was being developed as a directly ingestible oral dosage in tablet form as opposed to a hypospray injection. Although a somewhat unorthodox approach for the times, the particular composition of Inbriden had made it difficult to find excipients to use in the hypospray injection. All of the standard excipients had produced bizarre unstable chemical behavior in the drug itself, significantly reducing its effectiveness; however, older excipients used in the formulation of tablets and capsules had no such effect on the drug, leading the research team to take a slightly more abnormal approach to Inbriden's development.

Developing the drug in tablet form was a creative solution to the problems with unstable chemical behavior, but they opened the door to a whole new set of problems with bioavailability. Injecting medication directly into the bloodstream via hypospray made it completely and immediately available to the body's transportation network to utilize in addressing whatever it was developed to address. However, an ingestible form of the medication meant the medication had to make its way into the bloodstream, and the process of digestion varied widely between species.

Olsam hopped up from his pillow nest and made his way to the door, snagging his lab coat off the coat hook. A short, snowy train ride and he'd be back in Paris at the Pasteur Institute where he could start exploring the hunch more in-depth. It wasn't a solution in and of itself, but it was at least a place to start.

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Lieutenant JG Olsam Mott, M.D.
Assistant Chief Medical Officer
U.S.S. Galileo

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