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Developing a cancer drug without Big Pharma: this hospital shows it can be done

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Re: Developing a cancer drug without Big Pharma: this hospital shows it can be done

#91

Post by StefanBatory »

vasco wrote: post #28
rahkiin wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PhD candidates are paid salary in the Netherlands. Less of course than the senior trial researchers at pharma. I also would not assume there is no compensation for subjects as thats part of the medical-ethical process and not just ‘it helps the subject so no money’.

The €30k to €35k per year they make in this context approximates to free. Any normal company has to pay much more than that for less. A non-phd software engineer will get paid much more to change button colors for example. So that can't be the reason they are expensive and a PhD candidate is doing many other things than just helping to run trials.

Also as much as it pains to say, 30-35k Euro is high salary there. :(

Re: Developing a cancer drug without Big Pharma: this hospital shows it can be done

#92

Post by mft_ »

ramraj07 wrote: post #41
EternalFury wrote: post #14

Anyone can mix chemicals in a test tube and claim it’s the cure for something. That’s the easy part. Proving it’s safe and effective, that’s what requires a lot of capital expenditure. This statement is a drastic characterization, but you could say “half a dozen PhDs can form reasons to believe they may have found a cure for something”, and the paragraph would end the same.

Got my PhD from a lab that works on antibody drugs, they eventually even released one to the market. I’d argue that our current system is broken. There’s no reliable metric of drug effectiveness in any of our pre-clinical models, and thus we end up going into clinical trials quite blind indeed. And more often than not, what drug gets into trials has more to do with ego and politics than actual scientific merit. And t…

It doesn’t (have to) cost billions to bring a (successful) drug to market.

And if you pick a single successful example that was discovered in academia, was spun out into a small focussed biotech, and was in a disease area that didn’t require large or multiple studies to make it to market, you’ll have your anecdote to prove your point.

Except… you’d be ignoring the costs of the 90% of drugs that fail in phase 1. You’d be ignoring the huge amount spent on discovery across the industry that never leads to a successful candidate.

Drug discovery and development is difficult because, for all of our clever science, it’s still essentially serendipitous and random. And we’ve not yet figured out how to make a production line out of something that’s random, try as we might. And it’s expensive because of the failures as well as the cost associated with success.

Re: Developing a cancer drug without Big Pharma: this hospital shows it can be done

#93

Post by evantbyrne »

ramraj07 wrote: post #41
EternalFury wrote: post #14

Anyone can mix chemicals in a test tube and claim it’s the cure for something. That’s the easy part. Proving it’s safe and effective, that’s what requires a lot of capital expenditure. This statement is a drastic characterization, but you could say “half a dozen PhDs can form reasons to believe they may have found a cure for something”, and the paragraph would end the same.

Got my PhD from a lab that works on antibody drugs, they eventually even released one to the market. I’d argue that our current system is broken. There’s no reliable metric of drug effectiveness in any of our pre-clinical models, and thus we end up going into clinical trials quite blind indeed. And more often than not, what drug gets into trials has more to do with ego and politics than actual scientific merit. And t…

Some drugs not being able to make it into phase 1 clinical trials sounds like a functioning regulatory system to me. The bar isn't astronomically high for a phase 1. Like sure, you can't just do it in your garage like a web startup, but there are reasons for that. If anything, there are way too many drugs floating around in LDT right now, hence why those are being faded out.

Re: Developing a cancer drug without Big Pharma: this hospital shows it can be done

#94

Post by dennis_jeeves2 »

triceratops wrote: post #86
dennis_jeeves2 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very wrong on all 3. It's an extremely naive world view.

Please explain to us all why glory and survival aren't more effective motivators than the money to be made from patenting something.

Things simply don't work that way. It cannot be explained, it has to be experienced.

Re: Developing a cancer drug without Big Pharma: this hospital shows it can be done

#95

Post by wat10000 »

datavirtue wrote: post #76
DrScientist wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> prove that it’s better than what currently exists. So how do you do that ethically? How do you justify taking off something that you know works to some extent and try something completely new or worse placebo? ie don't you have to construct the trial in the context of existing treatments etc? These are the kind of challenges that makes drug development slow - in the end you don't do one trial, but a series of trial…

[flagged]

Sorry, are you having difficulty with the concept that human prisoners should have more rights than mice?

Re: Developing a cancer drug without Big Pharma: this hospital shows it can be done

#96

Post by jodleif »

InDubioProRubio wrote: post #89
wesselbindt wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, not doing human testing on poor folks without a choice is really "angelic" and "perfect". Very high bar to set, how could we possibly achieve such high standards of morality?

They have a choice. To use the medicine or not. The choice is gone in the other case- where you can die of cancer for "ethical" comission reasons.

That’s essentially a non-choice. Also data of self-administration is probably worthless.

Re: Developing a cancer drug without Big Pharma: this hospital shows it can be done

#97

Post by nradov »

ckemere wrote: post #81
nradov wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any plausible biological reason to think that there could ever be a single cure for cancer?

Perhaps immune-based therapies like CAR-T are based on the premise that there are many cancerous cells in your body all the time, but your immune system deals with them, and it’s only when it fails to do so that you end up in the pathological state. So the “single cure” is the normally-functioning immune system?

That might be part of it. And yet sometimes people with normally-functioning immune systems also get cancer. So while that might be an effective treatment for some patients it's not going to be a universal cure.

Re: Developing a cancer drug without Big Pharma: this hospital shows it can be done

#98

Post by wat10000 »

NotGMan wrote: post #63
shepherdjerred wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s pretty unlikely that this is true for a few reasons: - Doctors want the best outcomes for their patients. They’ll use whatever treatment is most effective - Doctors want the best outcomes for themselves. If they’ve found an effective treatment that others are overlooking then they’ll seek to publish - Patients want the best outcomes for themselves. If there is an overlooked treatment then they’ll communicate it…

>> If there is an overlooked treatment then they’ll communicate it to their doctor Hah sure. Try this and tell me how the egomanical "gods in white" react. Go through some stuff the RFK says about vaccines etc... and you'll see that in real life it's the opposite.

The only thing you should take away from the stuff RFK says about vaccines is that RFK is a complete kook.

Re: Developing a cancer drug without Big Pharma: this hospital shows it can be done

#99

Post by shepherdjerred »

dennis_jeeves2 wrote: post #82
shepherdjerred wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s pretty unlikely that this is true for a few reasons: - Doctors want the best outcomes for their patients. They’ll use whatever treatment is most effective - Doctors want the best outcomes for themselves. If they’ve found an effective treatment that others are overlooking then they’ll seek to publish - Patients want the best outcomes for themselves. If there is an overlooked treatment then they’ll communicate it…

Very wrong on all 3. It's an extremely naive world view.

What do you think is correct instead?

Re: Developing a cancer drug without Big Pharma: this hospital shows it can be done

#100

Post by clooless »

pfdietz wrote: post #61
ramraj07 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Got my PhD from a lab that works on antibody drugs, they eventually even released one to the market. I’d argue that our current system is broken. There’s no reliable metric of drug effectiveness in any of our pre-clinical models, and thus we end up going into clinical trials quite blind indeed. And more often than not, what drug gets into trials has more to do with ego and politics than actual scientific merit. And t…

The current system is like Churchill's description of democracy: the worst system, except for all the others. Biology is extremely complex. There's no substitute for actually trying things out on subjects in vivo. For many diseases we don't even know the cause (Alzheimer's for example). Drug companies have all the incentive in the world to improve the system to get better odds; it's not like they want drug discovery…

We also don't understand how some drugs work, either (e.g. Tylenol).
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