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Antibody Drug Conjugates: A frontier in cancer treatment

sagelyhealth.com

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Re: Antibody Drug Conjugates: A frontier in cancer treatment

#11

Post by Supermancho »

tptacek wrote: post #9
AStonesThrow wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I don't believe this even in the most charitable reading.

Some people are convinced that healthcare initiatives are so corrupt as to be theater, in regard to finding new treatments, somehow forgetting that the competition is measured on a race to the highest survival rating (both in large populations and small populations looking to grow - ie Israel). Billions of dollars is nothing if you have billions of people paying even 20$ a month for the duration of their extended lives, going forward through history (since cancer wont stop). It's a purile fantasy that their is a cabal of mustache twirlers, sabotaging medical discovery.

Do you know what motivates hedges to fund new startups effectively? Success in previous investments. Drug cures have nothing but upsides for every economic strata.

Re: Antibody Drug Conjugates: A frontier in cancer treatment

#12

Post by zxexz »

tptacek wrote: post #9
AStonesThrow wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I don't believe this even in the most charitable reading.

That’s good, because it’s total nonsense. There are many things that hold back cancer research, but this story of conspiracy is not one of them.

Cutting edge pharma companies, believe it or not, have an incentive to cure cancer. Even from a naive supply and demand argument it makes no sense.

Re: Antibody Drug Conjugates: A frontier in cancer treatment

#13

Post by alexissantos »

mjewkes wrote: post #3
Panzer04 wrote: post #2

Every little step in fields like this is so encouraging. We keep getting better, but the cancers don't. Ever more effective cocktails of drugs that target the cancers while minimising harm to everywhere else, the closer we get to attacking cancer cells from so many different directions they simply can't adapt in time and we wipe it out immediately (a cure). One can only hope. I whether we might see even more investme…

CAR-T may have a ~50% cure rate for blood cancers: https://ashpublications.org/blood/article/141/19/2307/494672...

My uncle underwent CAR-T therapy and the turn around was amazing. He's got a brand new lease on life. We would have lost him without it.

Re: Antibody Drug Conjugates: A frontier in cancer treatment

#14

Post by epistasis »

AStonesThrow wrote: post #6
xk_id wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> whether we might see even more investment into research The field would benefit greatly from even a fraction of the investment in the AI and crypto bubbles

[flagged]

Suppose for one second that all these people are profit motivated. Whatever research money there is, there is far far far more to be had for the patent royalties from treatments.

Not even close. So much more money to be made from treatment than from research. And there is so much money to be had from beating a competitor with a better treatment than there is to have an equivalent treatment

Taking a cynical profit-only driven view of the world would optimize for better cancer care.

But nobody goes into it "aha I want to make a lot of money." They might go into it wanting to get famous for coming up with a cancer cure. But take the cures that are most closely associated with individuals, whether it's a drug targeting BCR-ABL1 fusions or HER2, and almost nobody knows their name. So even then the fame motive is pretty weak.

Re: Antibody Drug Conjugates: A frontier in cancer treatment

#15

Post by xk_id »

epistasis wrote: post #14
AStonesThrow wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Suppose for one second that all these people are profit motivated. Whatever research money there is, there is far far far more to be had for the patent royalties from treatments. Not even close. So much more money to be made from treatment than from research. And there is so much money to be had from beating a competitor with a better treatment than there is to have an equivalent treatment Taking a cynical profit-onl…

> Taking a cynical profit-only driven view of the world would optimize for better cancer care.

There are many promising research directions, which are however grossly underexplored, either because there is a low chance it might lead to a positive result, or because it cannot be patented even if it's successful. Examples in the latter category include off-label use of established procedures, or of already known drugs. Conversely, the majority of money and energy is being spent on highly predictable research and which can result in a patent; almost always the downside is low impact. So as you can see, profit optimisation is not correlated with impact optimisation.

Re: Antibody Drug Conjugates: A frontier in cancer treatment

#16

Post by xk_id »

Supermancho wrote: post #11
tptacek wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe this even in the most charitable reading.

Some people are convinced that healthcare initiatives are so corrupt as to be theater, in regard to finding new treatments, somehow forgetting that the competition is measured on a race to the highest survival rating (both in large populations and small populations looking to grow - ie Israel). Billions of dollars is nothing if you have billions of people paying even 20$ a month for the duration of their extended liv…

Except there is an overabundance of historical evidence of hedge funds giving almost exclusive preference to research which is highly predictable and has negligible impact, as long as it can result in a patent.

See for example below. Aging research is one of the most eclectic areas, because it touches on virtually all biological systems. There are countless promising directions which are grossly underexplored. Yet this massive hedge fund chose to invest in discovering new analogs to older drugs. Why? Because the older drugs are effective, discovering new analogs is easy and the patented products can then be marketed.

For general overview of the fund: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/06/07/1053132/saudi-ar...

Their first major investment was in analogues of a decades old drug called rapamycin: https://www.hevolution.com/en/web/guest/w/hevolution-foundat...

So, yes. There is a provable cabal of mustache twirling investors who optimise for profit, at the cost of impact. Why you would defend them, in spite of your self-professed rational interest in the positive externalities of revolutionary healthcare, is beyond me.

Re: Antibody Drug Conjugates: A frontier in cancer treatment

#17

Post by epistasis »

xk_id wrote: post #15
epistasis wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suppose for one second that all these people are profit motivated. Whatever research money there is, there is far far far more to be had for the patent royalties from treatments. Not even close. So much more money to be made from treatment than from research. And there is so much money to be had from beating a competitor with a better treatment than there is to have an equivalent treatment Taking a cynical profit-onl…

> Taking a cynical profit-only driven view of the world would optimize for better cancer care. There are many promising research directions, which are however grossly underexplored, either because there is a low chance it might lead to a positive result, or because it cannot be patented even if it's successful. Examples in the latter category include off-label use of established procedures, or of already known drugs.…

Calling off-label repurposing of established drugs "under explored" is a bit insulting to all those people that attempt it all the time, without a higher success rate than any other method. Folks like Razelle Kuzrock make great progress, and the "under exploration" is more about not spending enough time exploring RNA or protein diagnostics rather than DNA diagnostics, if anything. Which isn't due to lack of impact or profit optimization, just due to intuition biases of the field.

Calling profit and impact optimization "uncorrelated" is not justified by your comment. The biggest impact in the past decade of cancer has undoubtedly been immunotherapies, which are also by far hugely profitable. And immunotherapies themselves were often a backwater, far more so than drug repurposing, until the impact came through with a patented drug.

Re: Antibody Drug Conjugates: A frontier in cancer treatment

#18

Post by jchw »

AStonesThrow wrote: post #6
xk_id wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> whether we might see even more investment into research The field would benefit greatly from even a fraction of the investment in the AI and crypto bubbles

[flagged]

To be fair, dead and dying people are pretty bad at paying bills. Even assuming staggering, unrealistic levels of corruption in all parts of healthcare, someone in the chain ought to be financially motivated to see the patient recover.

Re: Antibody Drug Conjugates: A frontier in cancer treatment

#19

Post by peerless-app »

epistasis wrote: post #17
xk_id wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Taking a cynical profit-only driven view of the world would optimize for better cancer care. There are many promising research directions, which are however grossly underexplored, either because there is a low chance it might lead to a positive result, or because it cannot be patented even if it's successful. Examples in the latter category include off-label use of established procedures, or of already known drugs.…

Calling off-label repurposing of established drugs "under explored" is a bit insulting to all those people that attempt it all the time, without a higher success rate than any other method. Folks like Razelle Kuzrock make great progress, and the "under exploration" is more about not spending enough time exploring RNA or protein diagnostics rather than DNA diagnostics, if anything. Which isn't due to lack of impact or…

Good to see a shoutout to Kurzrock!

Re: Antibody Drug Conjugates: A frontier in cancer treatment

#20

Post by AStonesThrow »

jchw wrote: post #18
AStonesThrow wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

To be fair, dead and dying people are pretty bad at paying bills. Even assuming staggering, unrealistic levels of corruption in all parts of healthcare, someone in the chain ought to be financially motivated to see the patient recover.

[flagged]
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