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FDA approves first monthly injectable to treat HIV infection

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Re: FDA approves first monthly injectable to treat HIV infection

#191

Post by tehjoker »

abeppu wrote: post #73

> The cost, however, is steep — the list, or wholesale, price is $3,960 a month, or more than $47,500 a year. The list price for the one-time initiation dose is $5,490. Median income in the US is ~$31K apparently. So even in a rich country, this is like 50% more than the income of a typical person. My understanding is the funding for the trials was partly from NIAID. This seems like yet another case where public fund…

This video by Noam Chomsky on science funding explains this better than I can: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av96iIRa0f8

Re: FDA approves first monthly injectable to treat HIV infection

#192

Post by disabled »

malandrew wrote: post #179
abeppu wrote: post #73

> The cost, however, is steep — the list, or wholesale, price is $3,960 a month, or more than $47,500 a year. The list price for the one-time initiation dose is $5,490. Median income in the US is ~$31K apparently. So even in a rich country, this is like 50% more than the income of a typical person. My understanding is the funding for the trials was partly from NIAID. This seems like yet another case where public fund…

This is a brand new treatment. All things that are the product of cutting edge research and are difficult to get to market will be expensive. I'm taking an orphan drug that was approved in 2002/3 and costs more than this per month and last I checked the company that developed the drug was still in the red. This idea that drugs should be cheap and accessible the moment they are approved is incompatible with economic r…

> This idea that drugs should be cheap and accessible the moment they are approved is incompatible with economic reality.

I know that orphan drugs are lifesaving and it is life-and-death for the people who do and don’t receive them, but this is generally not true, including for orphan drugs. I know because I have 2 rare immune mediated neurological diseases affecting my peripheral nervous system and I take an orphan drug (blood product) known as subcutaneous immunoglobulin.

Soliris, one of the world’s most expensive drugs, costing ~$600,000/year in countries with “socialized medicine” is estimated to cost less than 1% of that price to produce, as in less than $6,000/year. This is from industry insiders who have technical experience. Not only that, it is estimated that 80-90% of the work was discovered on public, government funds. See at 11:30 https://youtu.be/0uYCw5EDX8U

I have a background in applied science and I agree that this is the general ballpark case for orphan drugs, based on reading patents.

Re: FDA approves first monthly injectable to treat HIV infection

#193

Post by disabled »

jacquesm wrote: post #157
offtop5 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could also buy a 10$ bus ticket https://khn.org/news/americans-cross-border-into-mexico-to-b...

Before long they'll be smuggling insulin rather than cocaine if it isn't already happening.

They already do.

People buy insulin off Craigslist, in a way that is similar to a drug deal, because they cannot get it elsewhere. They sit in the car while their “insulin dealer” brings them the insulin from Mexico/Canada and they pay them in cash.

See: https://youtu.be/VLwDvK0j4DQ

Re: FDA approves first monthly injectable to treat HIV infection

#194

Post by [deleted] »

ceejayoz wrote: post #36
jliptzin wrote: post #32

> In 2018, for instance, there were approximately 36,400 newly infected patients living with HIV in the U.S. It's 2021, why are we only seeing 3 year old HIV infection numbers? How come I can see coronavirus infection numbers updated pretty much hourly but reporting on HIV infection rates in this country is lagging 3 years?

COVID takes a few days to show symptoms and get diagnosed. HIV takes a lot longer. https://www.onlineathens.com/news/2017-11-28/cdc-lag-time-be... > In their monthly Vital Signs report out Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that the median time between infection and diagnosis with HIV was three years in 2014, about seven months shorter than in 2011. If you got HIV in 2020, chances are yo…

[deleted]

Re: FDA approves first monthly injectable to treat HIV infection

#195

Post by est31 »

thisrod wrote: post #145
ed25519FUUU wrote: post #28

> In 2018, for instance, there were approximately 36,400 newly infected patients living with HIV in the U.S. This number seems insane to me in the USA . Why is a well known deadly disease, with well understood transmission vectors, still spreading so prominently here?

I was about to reply: because no one ever recovers from HIV infection. Then I realised it isn't true. People being treated for HIV are not contagious, so they "recover" in the epidemiological sense the moment they start treatment. The only way that can happen is if a lot of people have HIV but don't know it.

> in the epidemiological sense the moment they start treatment

It usually takes weeks to months from treatment start until your copy number becomes non-contagious.

https://www.niaid.nih.gov/diseases-conditions/10-things-know...

Re: FDA approves first monthly injectable to treat HIV infection

#196

Post by kepler1 »

bagacrap wrote: post #180
perardi wrote: post #68

As someone who is in this high-risk community: good news. (Well, except for that price tag.) People, to a first approximation, are just terrible at pill compliance. Doesn’t matter the demographics, people just aren’t perfect at taking a pill, every day, at the same time, forever and ever. Having that injection where you can set it and forget it? Nice advance. Not game-changing, but still a nice move forward. And I th…

I'm not one to lead the cancel brigade but you could have just said "some communities". There are plenty of white communities that frown on homosexuality so I don't know what is gained by citing demographics. Since there's no purpose in calling out race, but you did anyway, I can see how some might see this as an unprovoked attack.

So you don't want others to talk about race, but you're happy to bring it up and make it an issue because you take offense at any mention of it you deem too sensitivity-provoking. What do you want exactly? Sounds like you are very nearly someone who leads a cancel brigade.

Re: FDA approves first monthly injectable to treat HIV infection

#198

Post by gibybo »

refurb wrote: post #135
lake-effect wrote: post #56

Pharmacy (i.e. the cost of drugs) is a big contributor to rising healthcare costs and injectables are an increasingly more popular and very expensive way to deliver drugs. This is a good example of how R&D and drug development works in the US. Invest time and energy in a much more profitable form of treatment for a disease that is already managed.

Pharmacy is about 10% of total healthcare costs so not a major driver of rising healthcare costs, but it gets a lot of media attention. And no, they didn’t create an injectable drug because it’s “popular”. They did it because it address compliance of oral therapies.

>Pharmacy is about 10% of total healthcare costs

That's good to know and something I've been curious about. Do you have a source that breaks down the other 90%?

Re: FDA approves first monthly injectable to treat HIV infection

#199

Post by est31 »

renewiltord wrote: post #40
damnyou wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's not the reason, given that PrEP exists. The actual reason is that Truvada, like other healthcare, can be hard to get in the American system.

Have we considered telling people to "just stay home" and to "not have sex"? Maybe that's the trick.

Telling people to not ever have sex is different from telling people to not meet in large groups during an acute and temporary pandemic. Especially when you only forbid sex for a subset of the population while the remainder of the population is allowed to have sex. The group ban on the other hand is mostly unrestricted and thus more fair.
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