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USA buys up world stock of remdesivir

theguardian.com

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Re: USA buys up world stock of remdesivir

#101

Post by JamesBarney »

awinder wrote: post #93
rayiner wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pandemic aside, the US government shouldn’t get a better deal than any other investor. If you invest “tens of millions” into drugs that will cost “billions” to bring to market, you don’t get to get the drug for free. Imagine a Silicon Valley investor proposing those terms: we’ll invest $1 million in your startup for 75% of the equity. But that’s exactly what people are proposing when they say a few tens of millions o…

I don’t think people are asking for “free”, they’re asking for “at cost”, or some sort of bulk deal. There is actually a lot of precedent for that in SV deals, for one people get some return on investment (the bulk order discount / profit cut deal). Second you get deal modifiers like facebooks sweetheart ad deal for Microsoft’s 240M funding round, which might be akin to “if we fund this thing we need you to work with…

At cost is highly problematic when your investor is also your largest consumer by a huge margin.

Re: USA buys up world stock of remdesivir

#102

Post by dralley »

koheripbal wrote: post #100
plicense wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my friends is an anaesthetist dealing with Covid patients day in day out in India. She works for a Government hospital and they started trying Remdesivir 3 days ago. She said all three patients that they have given the drug to have died of arrest - she does insist though that its not because of the drug but she was saying that it isn't improving things if the patient is in late stages of Covid.

This is a worthless 2nd hand hearsay anecdote. Remdesivir has a minor beneficial impact when delivered VERY EARLY. No need to spread FUD when there's clinical data available.

>Remdesivir has a minor beneficial impact when delivered VERY EARLY.

There's still a couple of problems though:

* It has to be delivered by IV drip

* It's in short supply

* It's expensive

Which means that realistically, the only way to get a positive impact from it would be to send high-risk patients who were very likely to have just been exposed to the hospital for the injection. Even then, the risk-value proposition does not seem that great.

Re: USA buys up world stock of remdesivir

#103

Post by dralley »

stoneglyph wrote: post #77

This is a terrible waste of money. Hydroxychloroquine is less expensive, seems to be more effective according to the research, and backed by more science. You just have to look beyond your mainstream media to find the truth.

Hydroxychloroquine is not effective, but Remdesivir is not very effective either, so I would agree that it's a terrible waste of money.

Re: USA buys up world stock of remdesivir

#104

Post by latchkey »

londons_explore wrote: post #50

The drug that looked very promising for the last pandemic, yet turned out to have no benefit, and now looks very promising as a treatment for this pandemic... Smells to me like someone in the remdesivir marketing department is doing very well... Are there any scientific studies that don't have vested interests and show it's a good treatment?

There is a lot of competition. I think everything is on the table right now.

https://covdb.stanford.edu/compound-list/

Re: USA buys up world stock of remdesivir

#105

Post by koheripbal »

dralley wrote: post #102
koheripbal wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a worthless 2nd hand hearsay anecdote. Remdesivir has a minor beneficial impact when delivered VERY EARLY. No need to spread FUD when there's clinical data available.

>Remdesivir has a minor beneficial impact when delivered VERY EARLY. There's still a couple of problems though: * It has to be delivered by IV drip * It's in short supply * It's expensive Which means that realistically, the only way to get a positive impact from it would be to send high-risk patients who were very likely to have just been exposed to the hospital for the injection. Even then, the risk-value propositio…

None of these three points is the bottleneck. It's still easy to give someone an IV early on if they're in a high-risk group, it's not in that short supply, and at ~$2500 per treatment regimen it's not that expensive compared to an extended hospital stay.

The bottleneck is that it's only slightly effective.

Re: USA buys up world stock of remdesivir

#106

Post by moonsu »

throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #37
bearjaws wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, I work in specialty pharmacies and Remdesivir is a complicated drug to produce. Currently Gilead believe they can bring down their production time from 8-12 months 6-8 months, that means we won't see a large supply of this drug until 2021.

I have a noobish question. Looking at Remdesivir wiki page to try to get a feeling for why it's hard to make, their are some really odd chemicals used like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trimethylsilyl_triflate Why is something like this, with its silicon and sulphur atoms as part of the backbone, needed? Why wouldn't the same but with a more typical fully-carbon backbone work? If it's too complex a question, ski…

That compound in particular is used to help replace a C-OH bond with a C-CN bond. It may seem like a weird chemical but it's very commonly used in organic synthesis.

> Why wouldn't the same but with a more typical fully-carbon backbone work?

Because a fully carbon backbone would not be as reactive and would not attach/detach from the intermediate as needed

Re: USA buys up world stock of remdesivir

#108

Post by whymauri »

BurningFrog wrote: post #92
newsbinator wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the case of Remdesivir, which is hard to make, imagine you're the CEO of Gilead and the government of a country tells you they need it, people are dying without it, they're going to mass produce it at scale, and you're going to tell them how to retool their factories to produce it, since it'll take extra months of trial and error if you don't, during which people are dying and the disease is spreading exponentiall…

Thanks for playing along with my hostile invitation :) The great argument I wanted to make is that if there is a finite supply of a drug, only enough for 20% of the sick, selecting which 20% gets it doesn't cause more people to die. It might select who dies in deplorable or admirable ways, but the death count is the same. But you're making a different and better argument. I agree that your scenario would be terrible.…

>The great argument I wanted to make is that if there is a finite supply of a drug, only enough for 20% of the sick, selecting which 20% gets it doesn't cause more people to die.

This is what is done in patient outcome rankings for exotic therapies and surgeries that are a skill-based premium or are exceptionally expensive.

My perspective is, most small molecule therapeutics are already prioritized for production and trials based on synthesizability. So if some corporation really did find a viable treatment for COVID, I doubt scarcity would be the issue unless it fundamentally fails some medicinal chemistry principles for ease-of-synthesis. This is given how primed the global supply chain is to pump out a real treatment. Think of these checks as "code smell" checks, except in the early stages of drug development. Lead optimization is essentially the entire field of optimizing for desired properties, which is what would most likely be done to an extent if a molecule was prohibitively difficult to synthesize.

Btw, there's actually a LaunchHN on the frontpage that's right in the middle of tackling this kind of problem.

Re: USA buys up world stock of remdesivir

#109

Post by s1artibartfast »

walls wrote: post #27
ketzu wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that supposed to make someone angry? Because this seems like an okay solution to make back investments and still allow cheaper access for poorer nations. Still if they can't keep up with demand and there are many lifes at stake, we should probably legislate a compensated invalidation of such a patent.

> Because this seems like an okay solution to make back investments The investment was made by the American people paying taxes. The profits will be privatized. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/05/26/remdesivi...

the US government intentionally gives away money with no strings attached for R&D. The explicit purpose of this funding is to help companies make products and profit. If the outcome you want is different, we need to look at different research vehicles.

This section of your WaPo article hits the nail on the head:

>“Without incentivizing some of these companies to stay attached to emerging disease, I think they will walk away, even after this one,” he said. “In this situation [filing for a government patent] would have caused more harm with Gilead and not been worth it. “The government’s job is to make sure industry is successful, and if industry is successful, then we all benefit from it.” “Although USAMRIID performed extensive and critical screening and testing for Gilead, testing a compound and finding that it is indeed an effective antiviral compound does not qualify USAMRIID as a joint inventor of the compound,” Leigh Callander, chief patent counsel for the U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command, said in an email.

Re: USA buys up world stock of remdesivir

#110

Post by s1artibartfast »

rayiner wrote: post #66
walls wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because this seems like an okay solution to make back investments The investment was made by the American people paying taxes. The profits will be privatized. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/05/26/remdesivi...

Pandemic aside, the US government shouldn’t get a better deal than any other investor. If you invest “tens of millions” into drugs that will cost “billions” to bring to market, you don’t get to get the drug for free. Imagine a Silicon Valley investor proposing those terms: we’ll invest $1 million in your startup for 75% of the equity. But that’s exactly what people are proposing when they say a few tens of millions o…

Also, if you donate no-strings grants and services, you are not a investor in the traditional sense. You are providing charity.
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