With no prospects for profits, big pharma neglects new infectious diseases
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Re: With no prospects for profits, big pharma neglects new infectious diseases
#2Perhaps they’re behaving entirely rationally. Infectious diseases do not kill that many people compared to cancer in America.
We may have a bad “flu” year this year, with a spike of elderly deaths, but we have a bad cancer year every year.
Re: With no prospects for profits, big pharma neglects new infectious diseases
#3With the amount of economic upheaval from the coronavirus scare, I fail to see how there are no prospects for profit.
Re: With no prospects for profits, big pharma neglects new infectious diseases
#4What's needed is a new payment model for anti-infectives. This already happens at a small scale with grants from institutions like BARDA. The DOD of also does this for vaccines for biological weapons like anthrax where there is a high likelihood the drug will never be used, but a vaccine is needed because if there is an outbreak, the consequences are severe.
Basically, rather than paying for drugs on a per unit basis, you pay a lump sum for access to the drug. This solves the issues of spending $100M to develop a new treatment for some disease where there is never a outbreak and you cover none of the cost of R&D.
There have been ideas to have X-Prizes for new antibiotics. Discover a new drug for a anti-biotic resistant infection? Great, here is $500M as long as you agree to produce as much drug as needed for free or some nominal cost.
Re: With no prospects for profits, big pharma neglects new infectious diseases
#5In the 1960s big increases in regulations on new drug development led to big cost increases, and hence less interest in non-blockbuster treatments.
Re: With no prospects for profits, big pharma neglects new infectious diseases
#6With the amount of economic upheaval from the coronavirus scare, I fail to see how there are no prospects for profit.
Creating value is one part, capturing it is another
Re: With no prospects for profits, big pharma neglects new infectious diseases
#7With the amount of economic upheaval from the coronavirus scare, I fail to see how there are no prospects for profit.
SARS vaccine was abandoned after the epidemic died out because the funding was cut. Pharma is being perfectly rational knowing that in 6 months all of the funding may be cut.
What's not rational is cutting funding to supposedly disappeared diseases. They do re-occurr. The Spanish Flu died out at first, only to re-emerge in WW1 trenches and wreck absolute destruction.
Re: With no prospects for profits, big pharma neglects new infectious diseases
#8"Neglects" implies that they're ignoring their responsibilities. How is this the case?
Re: With no prospects for profits, big pharma neglects new infectious diseases
#9In the 1960s big increases in regulations on new drug development led to big cost increases, and hence less interest in non-blockbuster treatments.
Sure, but as a result we don't have problems like thalidomide popping up every decade or so. There are benefits (and drawbacks) to having a much more stringent approval process.
And probably worth adding that in public health emergencies, the FDA is more than willing to pull back on regulations in the interest of the public good.
Re: With no prospects for profits, big pharma neglects new infectious diseases
#10What's needed is a new payment model for anti-infectives. This already happens at a small scale with grants from institutions like BARDA. The DOD of also does this for vaccines for biological weapons like anthrax where there is a high likelihood the drug will never be used, but a vaccine is needed because if there is an outbreak, the consequences are severe. Basically, rather than paying for drugs on a per unit basis…
> Great, here is $500M as long as you agree to produce as much drug as needed for free or some nominal cost
Why not give $5bn (or whatever the NPV of the drug at a reasonable rate of return might be) in exchange for releasing the drug into the public domain? Then any number of generics manufacturers could be contracted to maintain a stockpile.