Are there national laboratories with the capabilities to find a cure?
Is there a NASA equivalent for infectious diseases to launch a covid-19 moonshot?
With no prospects for profits, big pharma neglects new infectious diseases
41–50 of 128 posts
Re: With no prospects for profits, big pharma neglects new infectious diseases
#42Sounds like a good time for capital N nationalization! :)
Re: With no prospects for profits, big pharma neglects new infectious diseases
#43What'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…
> 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.
If you were going to develop the drug at your own cost with no subsidy for failure, why settle for 500M? Why not do it on your kwn merit and reap billions instead? And keep all the IP.
Re: With no prospects for profits, big pharma neglects new infectious diseases
#44Perhaps 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.
Perhaps what's "rational" in a purely economic sense isn't whats best for the nation or for society. In an economic sense, you could make an argument that slavery is "rational" as far as profits for slaveholders are concerned, but we don't allow slavery because its wrong and immoral despite the potential economic benefits to certain vested interests. Similarly, perhaps its time that we as a society reevaluated our re…
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Re: With no prospects for profits, big pharma neglects new infectious diseases
#45In 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.
Thalidomide was never approved for use in the US, and the heavy regulation came afterwards.
Re: With no prospects for profits, big pharma neglects new infectious diseases
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wasn't using the word "artificial" in a negative sense; I was pointing out that this is a narrow example of socialized healthcare and why it's beneficial.
Gotcha. As an aside, the "netflix model" for drug payments is already a reality in Louisiana. Basically the drug maker and state government negotiated a payment for enough hepatitis C drugs to cure everyone in the state.[1] [1] http://ldh.la.gov/index.cfm/newsroom/detail/5181
> treat patients within Louisiana’s Medicaid and Department of Corrections populations
Only Medicaid + inmates, not everyone in the state?
Re: With no prospects for profits, big pharma neglects new infectious diseases
#47Since COVID-19 is targeting elders, I can imagine there are evil capitalists or bureaucrats who view this pandemic as a gigantic economic stimulus for the next decade. Sorry for my evil thought.
Re: With no prospects for profits, big pharma neglects new infectious diseases
#48I thought the "party line" was that private industry doesn't accomplish much if anything, so isn't "big pharma" irrelevant? It makes more sense to demand higher taxes and more basic research.
The problem is that regulation is so expensive there isn't any financial motivation in researching does that are unlikely to generate massive revenue. The reason for this is FDA is fundamentally extremely conservative. The people that run the regulatory system are just faceless bureaucrats and are risk adverse. Their pay is based on seniority and there isn't any financial motivation for them to take risks or stand ou…
>So the big name brand drug companies just buys them all up. And because of that they no longer face competition from generics. They own both the name brands and the generics.
Didn't something like this happen with Martin Shkreli? From what I've read, the drug that they upped the price on had its patent expire decades ago. It's just that nobody else was producing the drug, presumably because it wouldn't make enough money. This resulted in essentially one company being the sole source of the drug, not because of patents, but because of cost.
Re: With no prospects for profits, big pharma neglects new infectious diseases
#49So there you have it. Late Stage Capitalism Failure. No ability to make a bajillion dollars in rent-seeking profit. So F it! Let the people die.
Well, if capitalism is the problem, then why don't the socialist/communist countries develop the drug instead? Or alternatively, the community could come together and they could work on coming up with the treatment as a group. But we all know that neither of these are likely to happen. Researchers need money to live, labs need money to run.
Re: With no prospects for profits, big pharma neglects new infectious diseases
#50The article mentions the difficulties with clinical trials. It makes sense, now China running hundreds of studies on coronovirus with thousands of people: http://www.chictr.org.cn/searchprojen.aspx?title=&officialna... testing few drugs and their combination at a time, it's hard to do outside of epidemic.