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Indian Government uses special powers to slash cancer drug price by 97%

timesofindia.indiatimes.com

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Re: Indian Government uses special powers to slash cancer drug price by 97%

#191

Post by Produce »

driverdan wrote: post #109
Produce wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But the FDA is the most strict drug regulatory body in the world, and the amount of evidence for efficacy that they require from the industry is truly impressive and truly does warrant the billions price tag. Funny how there are so many SSRI's on the market. Funny how this model results in the conclusion that it's a good idea to give kids amphetamines when they are known neurotoxins. Funny how medical marijuana is t…

> Funny how there are so many SSRI's on the market. Why? What's wrong with SSRIs? > Funny how this model results in the conclusion that it's a good idea to give kids amphetamines when they are known neurotoxins. Giving amphetamines to children is certainly debatable but amphetamines are not neurotoxic. Meth amphetamines are neurotoxic, especially in recreational doses, but non-methylated amphetamines are not. > Funny…

>Giving amphetamines to children is certainly debatable but amphetamines are not neurotoxic. Methamphetamines are neurotoxic, especially in recreational doses, but non-methylated amphetamines are not.

At least do your research if you're going to act so certain about something. This post has links to a few studies demonstrating said neurotoxicity - http://www.longecity.org/forum/topic/47231-amphetamine-neuro...

>Why? What's wrong with SSRIs?

Gee, I don't know. Maybe the horrible withdrawal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSRI_discontinuation_syndrome) combined with the fact that their effectiveness is statistically insignificant (http://www.science20.com/natural_medicine_101_jeffrey_dach_m...).

Re: Indian Government uses special powers to slash cancer drug price by 97%

#192

Post by Produce »

betterth wrote: post #113
driverdan wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Funny how there are so many SSRI's on the market. Why? What's wrong with SSRIs? > Funny how this model results in the conclusion that it's a good idea to give kids amphetamines when they are known neurotoxins. Giving amphetamines to children is certainly debatable but amphetamines are not neurotoxic. Meth amphetamines are neurotoxic, especially in recreational doses, but non-methylated amphetamines are not. > Funny…

Funny thing about meth is that it's not that dangerous -- it's almost identical to adderral. The methyl group (meth-amphetamine vs amphetamine) really only improves the ability of the drug to cross the blood-brain barrier. It's basically a form of adderal with a slightly stronger bioavailability curve. The reason why meth is a public health issue while addy arguably is not is mainly because requiring a Doctor rx, usi…

>Funny thing about meth is that it's not that dangerous

Are you completely fucking stupid? Read these and stop spreading dangerously wrong information - http://www.amphetamines.com/neurotoxicity/index.html - http://www.aapsj.org/view.asp?art=aapsj080248

Re: Indian Government uses special powers to slash cancer drug price by 97%

#193

Post by w1ntermute »

ars wrote: post #182
w1ntermute wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read my comment here: http://hackerne.ws/item?id=3699868 It has nothing to do with the year, it has to do with the position of the US (as developing or developed) changing its viewpoint vis-à-vis IP rights.

In the 1800's the US was considered developed in comparison to other countries. (For example the Cotton gin was invented in the US.) You can't compare developed vs developing using 2000s definitions and at the same time using 1800s definitions for IP laws. You have to be consistent, pick one era and compare everything using the same definitions.

> In the 1800's the US was considered developed in comparison to other countries.

Not compared to Europe. There might have been some American inventions, but those paled in comparison to inventions from Europe. It wasn't until the late 1800s that things started to change.

> You can't compare developed vs developing using 2000s definitions and at the same time using 1800s definitions for IP laws.

> You have to be consistent, pick one era and compare everything using the same definitions.

For any sort of historical analysis, scientific levels of rigidity are impractical, because there isn't a large enough data set, so your point is moot.

Re: Indian Government uses special powers to slash cancer drug price by 97%

#194

Post by w1ntermute »

ars wrote: post #184
w1ntermute wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You completely missed my point. The reason the US approved the abolition of slavery and women's suffrage has nothing to do with the reason it approved IP protection for foreigners. The US approved IP protection for foreigners when Americans wanted to start having their copyrights protected in other countries - something that happened when it reached developed nation status. Now, the US is criticizing developing natio…

> something that happened when it reached developed nation status Nonsense. The US was born as a developed nation, it never had a period of time when it wasn't.

> Nonsense. The US was born as a developed nation, it never had a period of time when it wasn't.

You really need to study history again. There was a big gap between Europe and the US that wasn't closed until the late 1800s. In terms of scientific discoveries (which are often closely tied to patentable discoveries), Europe (Germany, more specifically) continued to lead until WW2, when we broke their PhD lineage with Operation Paperclip.

Re: Indian Government uses special powers to slash cancer drug price by 97%

#195

Post by Produce »

Aloisius wrote: post #150
dlytle wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an Adderall user, I can back this up. The symptoms of use are very similar to meth. Ever seen that "meth jingle" ad? The whole "pulling hairs out of your face, cleaning everything, etc" pitch is spot on to Adderall side effects. The difference is that Adderall side effects are dramatically more mild due to (as betterth said) a properly calibrated and reliable dose. Also, with Adderall, you can't afford to just tak…

Uh, having taken adderall nearly every day for 20 years, I can say that I have absolutely no temptation to take another when the first wears off. In fact, I tend to forget without an alarm and then wonder why I can't focus. Nor have I ever had any compulsion to clean everything in sight or pluck every hair from my face. It certainly makes cleaning easier, but I certainly don't feel the need to do it anymore on or off…

So you forget to take it for a couple of days? The biological half-life of dextroamphetamine is 10 hours and levoamphetamine 13 hours. That's 10 to 13 hours (since Adderall is a mix of both isomers) until just half of the dose you took is eliminated from your bloodstream. If you take something with a long half-life like that every day, it's constantly in your system. It takes roughly three days to completely eliminate a dose.

Re: Indian Government uses special powers to slash cancer drug price by 97%

#196

Post by JunkDNA »

malandrew wrote: post #179
betterth wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but the risk is this: the current model produces the majority of the world's NME's (new molecular entities, or truly new drugs that aren't just old drug + ibuprofen and a new name). We can sit here and talk about what's wrong with the system, but it ignores that this is the most successful system in the history of medicine for producing truly effective pharmaceuticals. But ultimately I agree, we may be in fo…

Does the current model produce the majority of the world's NMEs or does the current model simply bring them to market. From another comment on this topic, it sounds as though most novel research happens not in the labs of companies like Glaxo-Welcome or Pfizer, but in university research labs for a couple of million dollars. If this is the case, I imagine that any disruptions will occur at the C-suite level mostly, p…

This is a common misconception. While the basic research that underpins the biological theory might happen in academic labs, turning basic research into an actual medicine that will a) work and b) not blow up your liver in the process is exclusively the province of drug companies currently. In fact, medicinal chemists (the people that actally figure out how to make the compound and scale up the manufacturing) are almost exclusively found in industrial drug development companies. They don't exist in any appreciable numbers In academia. They are analogous to the rocket scientists at NASA who worked on the moon missions that everyone worries can't be replaced because they have such specialized experiential knowledge.

Every once in a while an academic research lab will spin off a biotech to develop a new compound, but in general this is not how things have been done in the past. There is a current trend to in-license things from academia to lower the companies' exposure to early R&D risk. This ignores the fact that early research costs pale in comparison to the later clinical trials where most potential drugs go to die. Cancer is particularly bad with something like a 98% failure rate. In-licensing from academia isn't going to buy you much comfort when the thing doesn't work in a phase III clinical trial.

Re: Indian Government uses special powers to slash cancer drug price by 97%

#197

Post by Produce »

crusso wrote: post #122
Produce wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human lives are at stake, there's nothing more cut and dry than that. We need to stop trying to make our reality fit our models and start adapting our models to fit reality. This whole business is backwards.

Human lives are at stake if we screw up the drive to discover new drugs that will save future lives. Imagine if you had eliminated Bayer's incentive for even creating this cancer-saving drug in the first place. How many lives would you have ended prematurely? Imagine all the new drug research that depends upon Bayer's initial research that will save yet more lives. Like I said, it's not so cut and dry. The pharmaceut…

>Imagine if you had eliminated Bayer's incentive for even creating this cancer-saving drug in the first place.

It's distressing that people think that the only possible motivation for inventing life-saving drugs is money.

Lots of people want this and lots of people want to put in the work. Our governments are supposed to be representing us, right? In fact, they are already one of the main contributors to cancer research (http://kcl.academia.edu/RichardSullivan/Papers/263427/Trends...). So why are we leaving it to profit hungry organisations to literally save our lives? If governments do all the research instead then they can all collaborate and share each others' knowledge. That way everyone gets access to everything just by doing their part. It's the open source, creative commons approach to the problem. People can pay a company to do research just so that company can turn around and charge them a fortune or they can pay the equivalent amount in taxes and get cheap product with guaranteed access.

Business is useful for a lot of things but definitely not the basics. They need to be kept simple, cheap and reliable. Only way to achieve that effect is through collaboration, not competition.

>The pharmaceutical industry has had quantifiable and demostrable success

Then I guess our definitions of success differ. To me, success is not in how big their turnover is but what kind of an impact they make on the world and how fairly they treat it. I don't blame anyone for these kinds of actions, their monkey spheres (http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html) are full and they can't empathise with the people they affect. They're just reacting to the rules of the game. And that's what's backwards - the game, but we can choose to play a different one.

Re: Indian Government uses special powers to slash cancer drug price by 97%

#198

Post by DanBC »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #181
Alex3917 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Almost all the cost in a drug is the manufacturer recouping R&D costs. Actually that's not true. Big pharma spends twice as much on advertising as they do on R&D: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080105140107.ht... They also spend a significant amount of money on government fines due to corrupt practices (i.e. killing people). They are now the single most corrupt industry, paying significantly more fine…

Keep in mind that the majority of the cost that gets put under the "advertising" label is actually free samples. Those effectively lower the cost of care for patients, it's not just money spent on madison avenue.

There's no need for free samples in the UK[1], there's no direct marketing to patients, and yet we had to pass laws to stop marketing aimed at doctors.

Pharmaceutical companies were spending around £10,000 per GP per year. (About 40,000 GPs in UK * £10,000 == £400,000,000) Because of our PPRS that figure is probably one of the lowest in Europe.

The UK spends about £11billion per year on medication. Of that about £8billion is spent on branded medication. We have regulation schemes aimed at driving costs down.

The market and regulation of medication is baffling with many hidden effects. Here's some ridiculously in-depth information about the UK Pharmaceutical Price Regulation Scheme, and about regulation of meds in Europe.

(http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/98432/E8...)

(http://www.oft.gov.uk/shared_oft/reports/comp_policy/oft885....)

[1] - because any medication is only £7.40 per item (per month) and only about 15% of people need to pay because of all the exemptions. Also, because of the pay structure of prescriptions there's a split between doctors (who write prescriptions) and pharmacists (who earn money for dispensing).

Re: Indian Government uses special powers to slash cancer drug price by 97%

#199

Post by jerf »

ori_b wrote: post #169
jerf wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a closer look at the post, and you'll see that what JunkDNA just said is that is going to happen, and hard . Right now they run about a 17% profit margin [1]. If they lose their cash cows en masse , that's going to go negative, fast. That's not that great a profit margin from that point of view. What are they going to do then? The only thing they really can, slash costs. It seems unlikely the all the slashing is…

A workable model may be industry/research partnerships with universities, with heavy government subsidies.

That's generally not a model that results in decreased costs, not to mention that we're in a situation now and for the forseeable future where people really need to stop thinking of the government as a free money fountain. We already can't fund our current commitments, adding yet more billions onto the already huge pile is not necessarily a good idea.

(And don't even think of trying to sell me on it being a net money saver. It won't be after the special interest groups are done with it.)

Re: Indian Government uses special powers to slash cancer drug price by 97%

#200

Post by refurb »

aaronblohowiak wrote: post #187
refurb wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is patently false. Most research dollars go into new therapies with completely new mechanisms of action. Companies are often working in similar areas, that's true. The best example of this is the statins. Lipitor was the 5th statin to hit the market. Was it a me-too drug? I guess, but it was also superior to the other 4 that came out first (less incidence of muscle damage, more efficacious). Did Pfizer say "Gee,…

>getting a new drug to market takes 10 years is this intrinsic to drug manufacture? would regulatory/tort reform help?

It's a combination of the scientific challenges in finding a new drug and the safety hurdles that the FDA puts up. Most of that 10 years is taken up by the clinical trials that the FDA requires.

I guess you could say it's the price of having access to thoroughly tested drugs that are both safe and efficacious.

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