Not to break the news, but there are dozens of underground clinical trials. Billionaires are not waiting for the FDA. That’s ridiculous.
They hire their own chemists, and make their own drugs. This is not complicated.
Developing a cancer drug without Big Pharma: this hospital shows it can be done
141–150 of 159 posts
Re: Developing a cancer drug without Big Pharma: this hospital shows it can be done
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Deeply disappointed by the comments replying to this. I would reply to each individually, but feel like I'd get throttled by hackernews, so I'll just reply to everyone here. --- shepherdjerred writes that this is unlikely because doctors want what is best for their patients and would notice a cure were it available. This is kind of true. Some doctors do know about and prescribe vitamin c with typical therapy. Here is…
Hi hi. You may be interested in the VITALITY study out of China from 2022. 400+ people given FOLFOX + Avastin (standard of care, first line for colorectal cancer) vs FOLFOX + Avastin + high dose Vit C. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35929990/ Roughly showed no change for the overall population, but a significant increase in progression free survival for folks with RAS mutations. As someone with a stage 4 colorectal…
Hey.
Sorry about your diagnosis.
Thanks for sharing. This is an interesting, though somewhat disappointing, paper.
One thing I didn't get while reading it was the specific blood concentration achieved. I noticed they mentioned 12 rounds with 3 infusion days and 1.5g/kg. I'm assuming they injected that amount daily.
I noticed they injected over a period of 3 hours. To my knowledge the half life of vitamin c in blood is only 2 hours. I wonder if the concentration of vitamin c ever got sufficiently high to induce apoptosis.
At IV clinics near me they offer 75g bags of vitamin c on the website that are administered over an hour. I bet you could go back to back and get a higher concentration. In the same trip I wonder if you could get something fun - an IV clinic near me offers a nootropic, methylene blue, might charge you up for a day of studying cancer treatments.
One final idea I've had, not sure how useful it is to you, is that you can an at home ultrasound for a few thousand dollars. You should be able to use it to see your intestines and the tumors growing inside. You could use this to monitor your own treatment - i.e. take daily pictures and examine before and after vitamin c therapy, to see if it does anything.
Best of luck to you. If you want to bounce ideas for DIY cancer treatments off of anyone let me know and we can exchange emails.
Re: Developing a cancer drug without Big Pharma: this hospital shows it can be done
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Human "normal" may not be enough. Bat "normal" might be. Of course, now we are crossing the threshold from medicine to bio-augmentation.
There is no free lunch in biology. Augmenting the immune system to better attack cancer is going to cause other problems. It's so naive to think there is some simple solution that will improve on a billion years of evolution. I mean it's not impossible but realistically what are the odds? There won't be any magic for cancer. It's just going to be slow grind to solve one hard problem after another.
There is no free lunch outside biology either. The problems that come with stronger immune systems may be more tractable or at least less unpleasant than cancer.
Also, you seem to be very pessimistic. Many interventions in the history of medicine, like washing hands or the first vaccine against smallpox, were almost "magical" in their efficiency: they addressed a lot of problems through a relatively trivial intervention.
It is likely that a lot of this low-hanging fruit has been picked up, but you insinuate that there isn't any low-hanging fruit to begin with, only an endless slog of attacking hard problems. That is way too negative.
Re: Developing a cancer drug without Big Pharma: this hospital shows it can be done
#144Earlier 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…
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…
> It doesn’t (have to) cost billions to bring a (successful) drug to market
> you’d be ignoring the costs of the 90% of drugs that fail in phase 1
It depends on what you call "bringing a drug to market".
_________________
* Phase I costs little, around $1M during the trial, and involves only a small group of participants (one or two dozen people), so it's not multi-center and it is manageable by a few people at a biotech. The problem is that most phase I trials fail, but this is not an issue of cost, it's an issue of the way it is decided as explained by ramraj07, another commenter.
Too often it is started on a hunch without solid pre-clinical data, sometimes it is because the drug was tested and failed in another disease and the managers "pivoted" to a new disease because then it costs little to try again, sometimes it's just a "weird IP/financial trick" where you combine an existing drug and an unrelated drug. Then you know you have a relatively efficacious drug, no need for toxicity studies and you can patent it.
On the contrary, many trials could be done on drugs with good pre-clinical data, but that does not happen because it would be hard to patent.
_________________
* A phase III costs around $25M for one or two hundred participants during the trial [0]. It lasts 6 months at most.
Some publications cite much higher numbers (~$1G), but this does not make sense as drugs are often developed by biotechs (startups, in other words) with only a few million in their pockets.
Another cost inflationary cause is subcontracting to CROs, as most biotechs do not have the manpower, knowledge and business connections to conduct the trial.
_________________
* Once a drug receives commercialization authorization, a major company usually buys the rights and then starts the marketing phase. This starts with teaching doctors on how to prescribe and administer the drug. It means publishing articles in the mainstream medical press, inviting doctors to conferences and workshops, and paying medical sales representatives.
It is costly, this is probably where are spend the ~$500M but for me, this is not drug development costs, it's just marketing costs.
[0] http://idei.fr/sites/default/files/medias/doc/conf/pha/conf_...
Re: Developing a cancer drug without Big Pharma: this hospital shows it can be done
#145Earlier 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…
This is particularly difficult for drugs that affect the brain, like MDMA for PTSD in veterans. What do you use as the control group for that, when patients and clinicians can tell that who got the real thing and who did not. I call this the bridge problem. In order to do science, you have to have a control group, but if I built a bridge across a ravine, we don't have to have cars drive off a cliff and fall into the…
That's a good explanation with the bridge. There is also the parachute clinical trial being used to explain the futility of it:
Re: Developing a cancer drug without Big Pharma: this hospital shows it can be done
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
When hospitals are contracted to do work in a clinical trial setting they take their costs and multiply it by 10 (at least). This was done in house with in house resources. This hospital has its own pharmacy that can synthesize drugs and give it to the patients. The pharmacy probably charged just the material costs internally and not for the time.
I don't know of any hospital pharmacy that has a full fledge biochemistry lab and production facility. Drug production is very different from the typical work done in a hospital pharmacy.
Of course they don't have capacity to make millions of pills. But they are GLP and GMP certified and make all kinds of custom stuff
https://www.avl.nl/en/preparing-for-your-appointment/departm...
https://www.avl.nl/en/preparing-for-your-appointment/departm...
https://www.nki.nl/research/facilities-platforms/bioanalytic...
Re: Developing a cancer drug without Big Pharma: this hospital shows it can be done
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess it's easier to casually mention you might not recoup your investment when it's not your $200mil but my point it's just that there's a lot of speculative technical research or cultural output that is very hard to predict outcome, some of these things also requiring high paid labor, and we don't have a huge thing around "omg if they don't all become billionnaires selling drugs nobody will make drugs because it'…
More people are developing drugs than going to space. And going to space is valuable and makes billionaires, because it's a super high risk, high reward industry. If you want to make it into only a high risk industry, no one is going to space.
Of course it's valuable, I just gave you another example of a difficult industry with highly paid labor that doesn't need all the bullshit pharma needs like extra crazy patenting systems, protection from side effects and then still cry that without them there would be no drugs because the process is so expensive. You've misinterpreted every comment in this chain.
Re: Developing a cancer drug without Big Pharma: this hospital shows it can be done
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Step 1: Create economic conditions in which vast numbers of people can’t afford medical care Step 2: Offer them the “choice” of possibly receiving care by being medical guinea pigs for those who created the situation that deprived them of medical care in the first place. A coerced choice is a not a free choice.
A non-help, because waiting for the idealized version of help - is still less worth than a "could-help" but under coercing economic conditions. A feel-good ideological purity is less preferable outcome then a tainted Samaritan.
Re: Developing a cancer drug without Big Pharma: this hospital shows it can be done
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t disagree with anything you’re saying. But it sounds like the parent said there’s a miracle treatment that the medical community is ignoring for lack of a financial incentive (and they then go on to mention a financial incentive?)
That's a ridiculous reading of my comment. Vitamin C induces cell death in a variety of cancers. That's what I wrote and it's not controversial, it's documented in dozens of studies. I went on to link an article by medical doctors and cancer experts (on cancer.gov) who explain how this works and also explicitly state that it's not being researched due to lack of financial incentive. I can't stop you from refusing to…
Not read the Vitamin C literature but there is an obvious contradiction in what you say.
ie how can you have sometime which is both obviously beneficial - backed up by dozens of studies and yet complain about lack of research - if it's so clear then why do we need more research?
I also suspect doctors don't require FDA etc approval if they wanted to prescribe vitamen C - so what's stopping them? Lack of research? But I thought you knew?
Having said all that it is beyond all doubt true that commercial organisations can't afford to spend money on researching drugs with no prospect of return - however I wouldn't characterise that as evil big pharma blocking something - it's simply just that's it's not their role.
That role belongs to organisations either funded directly by the public ( charities ) or indirectly ( taxes ) for the greater good.
Re: Developing a cancer drug without Big Pharma: this hospital shows it can be done
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know of any hospital pharmacy that has a full fledge biochemistry lab and production facility. Drug production is very different from the typical work done in a hospital pharmacy.
Of course they don't have capacity to make millions of pills. But they are GLP and GMP certified and make all kinds of custom stuff https://www.avl.nl/en/preparing-for-your-appointment/departm... https://www.avl.nl/en/preparing-for-your-appointment/departm... https://www.nki.nl/research/facilities-platforms/bioanalytic...
All of those examples are at best pharmacies with compounding capabilities and/or sterile fill capability.
They aren't manufacturing any medicines in those pharmacies. They are buying final product and then preparing it for administration.
GLP and GMP certified don't mean they are manufacturing. GLP are lab best practices and GMP is manufacturing, but it covers a lot of ground, so a basic pharmacy can be GMP and all they do is prepare sterile product.