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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

#81

Post by tim333 »

VvR-Ox wrote: post #65

1:0 for Capitalism vs. Humanity. Exactly this is why the motivation to do at least some things should not be bound to earning profit. There is common goods that we need to share, global issues that need to be addressed together and we need to find ways to achieve this if we want to develop further as a civilization. Money must not be the sole reason why we do things or we will fail with this "strategy" and we need to…

Not sure 1:0 is accurate scoring. Most of the drugs and medical advances we have came out of capitalist systems. Not saying that capitalism is perfect or there shouldn't be government funded labs also.

Re: With no prospects for profits, big pharma neglects new infectious diseases

#82

Post by amelius »

cjfd wrote: post #63
hnzix wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please put the invisible hands of the market over your ears and wait for the drugs to trickle down. Jokes aside - while people are justifiably pointing out the community healthcare angle, arguably this problem is exacerbated by the American FDA drug approval model, ie no corporation will fund clinical trials unless they're guaranteed a profit monopoly.

Actually, there is a market solution to this problem. I cannot claim to have thought this up, it was discussed in an episode of econtalk. Don't remember the person that was interviewed. The idea is that big pharma companies have to publicly post a price for each of their patents. If anyone is prepared to pay that price they get the patent for that price. Next there needs to be a tax that is a percentage of the price…

Here's another idea: let academia and government institutions develop the drugs, and if necessary outsource the clinical trials to specialized companies while not giving them any of the IP.

Re: With no prospects for profits, big pharma neglects new infectious diseases

#83

Post by ros65536 »

VvR-Ox wrote: post #71
Mirioron wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because there is no such countries until someone can prove otherwise (which will not happen because they don't exist). Big capital put this idea inside the heads of many people living in the West and until today they really believe there is countries who are socialist/communist. Neither the GDR nor the UDSSR or China are examples for countries like that and people who know about politics, economy and society know thi…

The classic no true communist country fallacy. Have you considered that no such country exists because it is impossible, vecause it so quickly devolves into socialist hell like in USSR, north korea?

Re: With no prospects for profits, big pharma neglects new infectious diseases

#84

Post by bocklund »

zachguo wrote: post #47

Since 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.

The price of the Wirecutter’s #1 recommended forehead/ear thermometer on Amazon has changed from $30 between 2016 and February 2020 to $100 since February.

https://camelcamelcamel.com/iProven-Thermometer-Temporal-For...

Re: With no prospects for profits, big pharma neglects new infectious diseases

#85

Post by maxerickson »

WalterBright wrote: post #69
jokowueu wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's was never approved because of one person that was continually harrased if it wasn't for her it would have been approved . There were only 11 people responsible to review these new drugs . For crying out loud pcp was approved as an analgesic after using it on a few prisoners . FDA's stringent approval process is required

> FDA's stringent approval process is required The downside of that is greatly reduced new drug development due to the expense, much more expensive drugs, and years of delay for the ones that are worked on. If you have a less popular disease, or can't wait years, you're out of luck.

FDA has a special process and contributes funds to developing drugs for rare diseases:

https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/office-clinical-policy-and-pro...

Re: With no prospects for profits, big pharma neglects new infectious diseases

#86

Post by bionhoward »

one way around this is to develop platforms which apply to a range of diseases. why reinvent some fancy shape of atoms for each disease? it's entirely possible to develop something which works on cancer and coronavirus. just look at CRISPR, or RNAi ... master delivery and you can simply re-target the therapy toward different sequences.

Here (https://github.com/bionicles/coronavirus) is code to design CRISPR-Cas13 CARVER (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109727651...) 30mer guides against regions of Coronavirus conserved between SARS, MERS, HKU1, and SARS-nCoV-2 (Covid-19 Virus) and not found in highly expressed Lung protein-coding RNA. Uses BioPython, Redis SADD/SISMEMBER, and tools from EMBL (Emboss Consensus and Clustal Omega Alignment) and data from NCBI. The good news is, it's probably possible to delete Coronavirus genome directly inside the lungs, without vaccines; just deliver nanoparticles or adenovirus (doesn't replicate) with an inhaler and express CRISPR-Cas13 and the gRNA using the Surfactant promoter sequence for lung-only expression of the therapy

disclaimer: I need to work on the readme and write a blog post, but the data is there and the general core works. There's ~30k guides possible and 226 target 13 longest conserved regions across 4 different outbreaks spanning 17 years of virus evolution (provides reasonable confidence these regions are necessary for the virus to function)

If anyone knows some folks in the Pharma / Biotech industry I could use help to run the tests on this, tell em to email bion at bitpharma.com

edit: readme improved. currently looking for promoter consensus sequences for lung (surfactant protein TFs like TTF-1)

Re: With no prospects for profits, big pharma neglects new infectious diseases

#87

Post by jmartrican »

I would imagine living customers and a workforce that is not quarantined would be reason enough, but hindsight is 20/20. It would be silly if the offices of a big pharma company are closed due to an infectious disease that the big pharma company would have been best suited to tackle but cant due to neglect in fighting infectious diseases.

Re: With no prospects for profits, big pharma neglects new infectious diseases

#88

Post by cactus2093 »

foogazi wrote: post #41

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?

The WHO is saying a vaccine is 18 months out, and I’m very curious what that means. I haven’t seen any detail as to why it takes that long.

It’s short enough that clearly they expect it won’t be very hard, like no one would say a general cure for cancer is 18 months out. So what is preventing us from speeding it up more? Why can’t it be made in 6 months, or 3 months? Is the majority of that 18 months a basic r&d phase of figuring out what will work? If so, why can’t it be parallelized and sped up with more resources? Is it time for clinical trials? To ramp up manufacturing? I can’t help thinking that for a disease that prevents such a big risk to society, there must be clever ways to speed up the normal process for this kind of thing, perhaps with some government involvement in funding or coordinating efforts.

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