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Ksolem
Trad climber
Monrovia, California
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Why invest in drugs that will only be used for a short time, when they can focus on markets with customers that will use the products for years or decades? And why invest in all that R&D for hard problems when you can just piggyback on pre-existing basic research and do a little bit of R&D for a big payoff?
That's a lot to unpack.
“Why invest in drugs that will only be used for a short time…?”
12 years is the most they get, so "short time" is built into the equation.
My experience is with anti-epileptic / anti-convulsant drugs. This is an area where there is constant improvement being made so there are many people who benefit directly from the relatively short lifespan of the drugs. I've gone through five drugs in the last ten years, each one a big step forward. If I was still taking the med available to me in 2007 my quality of life would suck.
“…when they can focus on markets with customers that will use the products for years or decades? And why invest in all that R&D for hard problems when you can just piggyback on pre-existing basic research and do a little bit of R&D for a big payoff?”
That sounds like the business model of the generics.
The idea that a drug company has an incentive to make drugs which stay on the market for years or decades makes no sense. They go generic within 12 -10 years after release, and the originators sales go away (except in rare cases like mine where generics are problematic.) No licensing. Nothing. But the real question is, aside from aspirin, how many drugs are cutting edge decades after their origin? In general I don't like statins, but some people have to resort to them. Should the drug they take be the same in 10, 20 years?
I agree with Reilly that it takes waaay to long to get a medication to market. Patents are good for twenty years from the date of invention, but eight years or more are spent getting through the FDA.
Regarding your link, obviously I have no idea why Pfizer made their decision. But I have read several articles lately about paradigm shifts in our understanding of Alzheimer’s and dementia. I think we could see a real shakeup in the field.
Chinese scientists found the cure for all type of cancer.
German clinics screen for faulty gens and replace them with the correct one. 99.99% defect free babies.
Re the Chinese, reliable citations please.
Re the Germans, we have the capability. A large constituency of religious nutjobs are against any kind of genetic therapy. I don’t know if they are responsible, but the FDA seems to be sitting on their hands on this one.
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Lituya
Mountain climber
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Re the Germans, we have the capability. A large constituency of religious nutjobs are against any kind of genetic therapy. I don’t know if they are responsible, but the FDA seems to be sitting on their hands on this one.
Lots of non-religious people have a problem with it too. There are many concerns that whole societies have a right to participate in with their voices. Not just "scientists" who want to dabble in public policy.
Blonde hair and blue eyes, anyone? German scientists, in particular, have much to atone for.
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Ksolem
Trad climber
Monrovia, California
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I get your point, and take it well. But at the same time gene therapy is real. It is here. And it can do a lot of good.
Your point about the possibility (probability?) of abuse is sobering.
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Lituya
Mountain climber
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Appreciated. On the level of disease-curing potential--e.g. cancers and auto-immunes caused by rearrangements, translocations, extra copies/protein overexpressions--I think it should be full speed ahead. But on the in-utero stuff I think ethics and public input should play a strong role before any serious meddling begins.
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zBrown
Ice climber
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a todo cachete
Hope and/or pray there are no Meltdown flaws in those genetic therapy chips and salsa
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Lituya
Mountain climber
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Jan 12, 2018 - 06:54pm PT
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Ken M says: Please someone, explain to me the profit motive for finding a cure for cancer? Once it is cured, industry will lose all the chemotherapy, radiation therapy, surgery, and associated hospital charges. Obviously, from an industry standpoint, they must be very pro-cancer!
Ken, you understand that chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery are, in fact cures for hundreds of thousands of people every year, right?
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Ken M
Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
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Jan 12, 2018 - 07:23pm PT
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Ken, you understand that chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery are, in fact cures for hundreds of thousands of people every year, right?
Maybe. But you have to wait five years to find out. You understand why, right?
They are also treatments for the cancer once it is there. But something that prevented the cancer would be a financial disaster to the cancer industry. What is the financial incentive to find it? Why would a commercial operation spend billions to find it?
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beaner
Social climber
Maine
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Jan 12, 2018 - 07:49pm PT
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I work in basic biomedical research.
For profit companies don't do basic research. Period. It is primarily done in government labs, research universities, teaching hospitals, and some private (non-government) non-profit research labs.
Basic research is the process of conducting research purely to better our understanding. It might result in a practical application 10 years down the road, or never. It might answer one question, only to raise 100 more.
It makes no sense to lock up basic research as proprietary information. The only way we progress scientifically, is if it is shared with the world so that other researchers can continue to push forward. The only practical way to fund this is through government research grants, because nearly all of these studies are never going to directly result in a marketable product -- but through many research projects conducted across many institutions we eventually advance humanities combined knowledge to the point where we understand a disease well enough to begin to research potential therapies. This is where applied research comes in, and this is the type of research pharmaceutical companies do. This is, of course, extremely expensive and time consuming, which is why patents are awarded for novel drug compounds.
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beaner
Social climber
Maine
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Jan 12, 2018 - 08:01pm PT
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The problem with "curing" cancer is there is a huge variability in the underlying genetic cause of the cancer. Two breast cancer patients could respond completely differently to the same treatments because there might be completely different genes involved. There isn't one cancer to cure. This isn't like smallpox or polio.
Cancer will eventually become a manageable chronic disease for most people. It's managed, and eventually they'll die of something else. There won't be "a cure", not because of some conspiracy to make money of people's illness, but because no cure could possibly work against all types of cancer.
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Lituya
Mountain climber
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Jan 12, 2018 - 08:50pm PT
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Well said. And I understand better than most.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Jan 13, 2018 - 12:53am PT
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The cult of science...
Moronic.
Because the government does things so efficiently...
Yes, in fact it does quite a few things efficiently that corporations can't, won't or f*#kup just fine on their own. And that's without getting into the fact somethings should never be driven by profit such as basic healthcare, K-12 education and prisons.
There won't be "a cure", not because of some conspiracy to make money of people's illness, but because no cure could possibly work against all types of cancer.
Exactly. Hell, it's almost not actually a disease per se and while we may come up with more or less effective approaches to deal with individual cancers on a person-by-person basis there will likely never be a way to prevent cancers from occuring.
let's just transfer the $100 billion the Guvmint annually gives out in corporation subsidies and let the free market actually work as claimed.
Fixed that for you and there's another $200+ billion in defense procurement contracts to corporations in 2018 that are loaded with waste by design.
Chinese scientists found the cure for all type of cancer.
German clinics screen for faulty gens and replace them with the correct one. 99.99% defect free babies.
No, they haven't.
Ken, you understand that chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery are, in fact cures for hundreds of thousands of people every year, right?
They're not cures, they are front like treatments that may or may not be effective for any given person depending on the stage of the cancer and the tumor genotypes involved.
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Lituya
Mountain climber
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Jan 13, 2018 - 09:01am PT
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The Columbia River janitor has spoken. Once, always, and forever a poser.
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Ken M
Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
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Jan 13, 2018 - 09:48am PT
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Kris, you are only partially right on the patent issue. There are a number of "tricks" to extend the effective patent time, for example:
https://io9.gizmodo.com/5865283/three-sleazy-moves-pharmaceutical-companies-use-to-extend-drug-patents
There is also the issue of the major pharmaceutical houses buying up all the major generic manufacturers. This allows them to produce a generic, but charge whatever they want.
A perfect example is Colchicine.
The plant source of colchicine, the autumn crocus (Colchicum autumnale), was described for treatment of rheumatism and swelling in the Ebers Papyrus (circa 1500 BC), an Egyptian medical papyrus.[17] Colchicum extract was first described as a treatment for gout in De Materia Medica by Pedanius Dioscorides, in the first century AD. Use of the bulb-like corms of Colchicum to treat gout probably dates to around 550 AD, as the "hermodactyl" recommended by Alexander of Tralles. Colchicum corms were used by the Persian physician Avicenna, and were recommended by Ambroise Pare in the 16th century, and appeared in the London Pharmacopoeia of 1618
An unintended consequence of the 2006 U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) safety program — was a price increase of 2000 percent [24] for "a gout remedy so old that the ancient Greeks knew about its effects."
In 2012 Asia’s biggest drugmaker — Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. — acquired URL Pharma for $800 million including the rights to colchicine (brand name Colcrys) earning $1.2 billion in revenue by raising the price even more
URL Pharma raised the price from $0.09 per tablet to $4.85, and the FDA removed the older colchicine from the market in October 2010
In April 2010, an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine said that the rewards of this legislation are not calibrated to the quality or value of the information produced, that no evidence of meaningful improvement to public health was seen, and that it would be less expensive for the FDA, the National Institutes of Health or large insurers to pay for trials themselves.
increasing annual costs for the drug to U.S. state Medicaid programs from $1 million to $50 million. Medicare also paid significantly higher costs—making this a direct money-loser for the government.
So the gov't paid for it anyway, but did not get the benefit of cheapness for all users
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Ken M
Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
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Jan 13, 2018 - 10:01am PT
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From YOUR link regarding Medicare administrative costs:
Is the gap between private and public health insurance providers’ administrative costs really that high? Most experts agreed the numbers looked about right. But because of key differences between Medicare and private insurance, the trade-off isn’t as simple as Sanders suggests.
The article, a political analysis and not a fiscal analysis, says their experts agree, then go on for the entire article attempting to discredit their own experts.
I think Sanders is largely right, 500 Billion in savings. per year.
The inefficiencies in the way private medicine is practiced is hardly to be believed. A huge proportion, perhaps 50%, is simply wasted on things that don't work, on duplicative inefficiencies, on non-medical expenditures that are not needed.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jan 13, 2018 - 10:14am PT
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Lituya writes: The Columbia River janitor has spoken. Once, always, and forever a poser.
which is a classical example of ad hominem argument. I actually don't even know who is being referred to, given that Lituya is another avatar creation shielding the poster from their posts, and offers very little to anything but the political threads on SuperTopo (less than 20 out of 229 posts on climbing, with maybe 1 actually good post on Mt. Rainier). Given that they are offered here without attribution suggests that even their author does not value their worth.
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matisse
climber
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Jan 13, 2018 - 01:25pm PT
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Without government funded basic science research all we will have is boner pills and wrinkle cream.
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NutAgain!
Trad climber
South Pasadena, CA
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Topic Author's Reply - Feb 7, 2019 - 01:05pm PT
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This guy has an awesome attitude:
[Click to View YouTube Video]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_tweezers
Here is an example of research that came from private enterprise funding. Bell Labs was the launching point for at least a couple of Nobel Prizes in Physics that I was previously aware of. But what modern companies are doing the kind of basic research they did back then, without an immediately marketable product line?
Maybe the last few years of ultra-successful wealthy companies, that don't want to die as one-trick ponies, have brought about a renaissance in research with distant and uncertain future payoffs. But will it be enough to keep the engines of science moving forward without strong government backing?
Time will tell.
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Do we need to spend how many billions on space ‘exploration’, astronomy in the netherworlds,
nuclear physics to find ‘particles’ that even a Dyson can’t suck up? Really?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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the Internet returns an annual economic activity annually that is equal to the amount of funding the particle physics has received over the history of its support...
...and it is the particle physics community that has given us the modern internet.
That's not a bad investment, in retrospect.
Of course, when I used Arpanet to communicate between LBL and SLAC for the particle physics group I worked with at the time (1975), we could not have anticipated the internet economy today.
In the modern corporate world, patents are important, published papers are not, and the drive to increase patents tips corporations to more Development than Research, the R and D in R&D.
The internet was not patented, the infrastructure and the software that runs it were given free to the commercial sector.
GPS is another example, the original GPS idea came from tracking Sputnik, by researchers at John's Hopkins APL, and quickly lead to the idea that a constellation of satellites could provide a way of accurately positioning objects, such as ICBMs.
Those clever scientists working with Federal support figured it out...
Now GPS is a transformative technology of great commercial value.
Really, Reilly.
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