21–30 of 47 posts
Pfizer acquired Seagen for $43 billion. Seagen has some very promising ADC’s in the queue. https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, dead and dying people are pretty bad at paying bills. Even assuming staggering, unrealistic levels of corruption in all parts of healthcare, someone in the chain ought to be financially motivated to see the patient recover.
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> The Food and Drug Administration approves new cancer treatments when they are shown in clinical trials to be more effective than the current approved cancer treatment for a given cancer type. The approval comes when the treatment extends lifespan without overly increasing the risks of serious side effects. This standard just doesn’t make sense to me. Every case is different, so why “throw out” a treatment option fo…
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CAR-T may have a ~50% cure rate for blood cancers: https://ashpublications.org/blood/article/141/19/2307/494672...
My uncle underwent CAR-T therapy and the turn around was amazing. He's got a brand new lease on life. We would have lost him without it.
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Some people are convinced that healthcare initiatives are so corrupt as to be theater, in regard to finding new treatments, somehow forgetting that the competition is measured on a race to the highest survival rating (both in large populations and small populations looking to grow - ie Israel). Billions of dollars is nothing if you have billions of people paying even 20$ 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 th…
Closely related drugs may not cure new diseases but they do help. There’s a lot of drugs like Morphine but the thing is that give doctors options for better treatment. Fast acting and fast metabolizing is beneficial when an EMT is helping someone deal is massive trauma, post surgery recovery and you want a different drug.
Cialis and Viagra may both make your dick hard, but millions of people benefit from the options from having both.
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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 th…
Funding in addition to not too the exclusion of. People still fund new restaurants and strip malls not just startups. Closely related drugs may not cure new diseases but they do help. There’s a lot of drugs like Morphine but the thing is that give doctors options for better treatment. Fast acting and fast metabolizing is beneficial when an EMT is helping someone deal is massive trauma, post surgery recovery and you w…
[0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=capitalism+breeds+innovation&t=fts...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funding in addition to not too the exclusion of. People still fund new restaurants and strip malls not just startups. Closely related drugs may not cure new diseases but they do help. There’s a lot of drugs like Morphine but the thing is that give doctors options for better treatment. Fast acting and fast metabolizing is beneficial when an EMT is helping someone deal is massive trauma, post surgery recovery and you w…
Funding is the essence of scarcity. Funding one thing means those money will not be funding anything else. But you're free to be content with countless minor variations on existing treatments [0]. Curing cancers will require an actual breakthrough. [0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=capitalism+breeds+innovation&t=fts...
Thus the percentage of that funding going to medicine isn’t fixed. We essentially spend extra money on this kind of research rather than diverting cancer funding to look for new pain medications. Further, people with sage IV cancer really have benefitted from better pain meds it’s not as useful as a cure but it’s still useful.
Capitalism has freed 90% of humanity to do something other than farm food. We’re in the 3rd stage of human history first almost everyone was hunter gatherer, then nearly everyone was farmers, now people do all kinds of things. How we spend that seemingly boundless surplus of labor may not seem efficient, but it doesn’t need to be to be dramatically better.
Anyone have a source on this half-recollected fact of mine? I can't find one.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
I don't defend "them". There is no "them". Conflating price gouging with lack of agency is, a different issue, outside of research. Patents count as output. Regulation hinders progress in the interest of safety and accountability. There are tradeoffs, granted. The idea that funds want to fund partial cures, rather than more comprehensive ones, is partially true. Comprehensive would be better for everyone, if it wasn't so damned difficult in western nations.
PHDs are predicated on thesis papers to prove something novel, which largely have no impact on society. This is a consequence of knowledge availability (and consequently utility), not maliciousness. Medicine is not special, in this regard.
The survival bias applies here. It's hard to know the diseases that are cured or have new treatments, because those cease to be issues at the forefront. Onchocerciasis? Nobody in the 1st world cares that was cured. Peptic ulcer disease? That was handled. What about medical procedures? Even incremental improvements to drugs, allow for more effective treatments or old treatments to have significant efficacy increases.
GL with whatever.