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Scientist who cured type I Diabetes in mice was denied funding for human trials

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Re: Scientist who cured type I Diabetes in mice was denied funding for human trials

#91

Post by Avshalom »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #53
LaGrange wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have "no presence at all" then you either have no money, in which case you can't really afford entering it (in this case, anyway), or you have the money, but then the above rules still apply. Effectively it would be better to market your mediocre product to physicians than to kill the cash-cow. Also, large risks are actually typical for this type of research. It's expensive and risky, so it has to give really…

Google had no presence at all in the spreadsheet market in 2005. I guess they really couldn't afford to enter the spreadsheet market. Too bad, because if google had money, and the above rules didn't apply, then google might create a free spreadsheet web service that competes with MS Excel even at the risk of destroying a gigantic cash cow owned by somebody else.

This is about cure versus treat. Google is trying to enter the spreadsheet market, not destroy it.

As an analogy Google Docs falls safely on the treatment side of the fence.

Re: Scientist who cured type I Diabetes in mice was denied funding for human trials

#92

Post by grandalf »

detst wrote: post #86
grandalf wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See my other reply: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1465601

That's not really fair. The government funds more than "development of military technology".

What percentage of the technologies that people cite as being made possible by the government were developed for non-military purposes?

Edit: The NSF started out as a way of enhancing military research: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation

Re: Scientist who cured type I Diabetes in mice was denied funding for human trials

#93

Post by rsheridan6 »

todayiamme wrote: post #89
rsheridan6 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>As others have pointed out there are StartUps with the money, but somehow we still don't hear about orphan drugs with potential to make it burst onto the scene. Imatinib. It was developed as a cure for CML, a disease which only affects a few thousand people in the US. That's just the most notable. From wikipedia's article about orphan drugs, "In the USA, from January 1983 to June 2004, a total of 1,129 different orp…

>"In the USA, from January 1983 to June 2004, a total of 1,129 different orphan drug designations have been granted by the Office of Orphan Products Development (OOPD) and 249 orphan drugs have received marketing authorization." Thanks. I realize my mistake now. I meant it as in how many new companies try something as risky as making an orphan drug? I shouldn't have leaped in with a bad example without checking it mo…

Here's a company that was started in 2006 with the intention of treating rare diseases: http://www.atonrx.com/background.php

They were just bought out for $318M. Not bad.

Treatments for rare diseases actually have fewer regulatory hurdles because of the Orphan Drug Act, which basically says that there's a lower standard of evidence for drugs that treat rare diseases.

>My point over here was that they fund them, but they might not fund something as risky as stem cell therapy.

Maybe not, but maybe that's a good thing, for reasons carbocation stated.

>is there an data freely available online on the composition of companies that market orphan drugs?

There's a list of drugs here (well, do a search on an empty string and you get a list) and the companies who make them, but it's not exactly predigested.

http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/opdlisting/oopd/index....

Re: Scientist who cured type I Diabetes in mice was denied funding for human trials

#94

Post by rsheridan6 »

dpik wrote: post #66
rsheridan6 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are lots of pharmaceutical startups. And, yeah, drug development is high risk. In other news, the sky is still blue. Type 1 diabetes is still a pretty big market even if you had a one shot cure. There are hundreds of thousands of type 1 diabetics. If they pay a thousand dollars each (a steal at that price), that's hundreds of millions of dollars. For comparison, there are a few thousand people with CML, but tha…

A steal at a thousand dollars ? I have Type 1 and would consider an actual cure a great deal even if it cost everything I own plus my entire earnings for 10 years.

I'm in the wrong business.

Re: Scientist who cured type I Diabetes in mice was denied funding for human trials

#95

Post by crocowhile »

dennisgorelik wrote: post #90
crocowhile wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Government sucks at innovation? What are you talking about? Pretty much everything that is basic science is paid by government in every nation. It is govt that gave us the internet, the bomb, and the man on the moon. Virtually every nobel prize in history has been given to people who worked for public universities.

1) Please show me "pretty much everything" that government developed in the last 30 years. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1465878 2) "Man on the moon" is pretty much useless for us. 3) Government didn't give us Internet as we know it now. Not even close. Government contributed may be ~1% into Internet (if even that). Considering how much that contribution costs to taxpayers every year -- government performance l…

1) I have been working as researcher for the past 12 years or so (cancer and neurobiology). Pretty much everything in the field of medical science is founded mainly by public money: this goes for salary and research money. Private contribution is quite minimal and proximal to zero in basic research.

2) Wut? Do you have any idea on the level of technological transfer that space research brings to your everyday life? This goes from materials that keep your home warm to GPS, really.

3) dude, arpanet is a project of DARPA. WWW is a project of CERN. I got money from DARPA and I study fruitflies for god sake.

You have no idea what you're talking about.

Re: Scientist who cured type I Diabetes in mice was denied funding for human trials

#96

Post by yummyfajitas »

ahoyhere wrote: post #81
yummyfajitas wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you believe most Viagra sales are primarily recreational?

Because there is no reason to believe that the % of men who have true ED matches up with the amounts of Viagra sold; because I've known many young men who talk about getting drunk or high and taking it, and because their companions agreed or in the least were not surprised; because the market for it online seems to be mostly young, healthy men who want to have greater stamina, not who have anything dysfunctional to b…

You don't see the tremendous amount of selection bias in your sample?

Very quickly: people who need viagra don't like to talk about it, unlike drunken frat boys. The online market is targeting men who can't get it from their doctor because they don't have ED. That doesn't mean the vast majority of viagra users aren't suffering from ED, it just means that online ads are targeting a niche market.

Re: Scientist who cured type I Diabetes in mice was denied funding for human trials

#97

Post by crocowhile »

carbocation wrote: post #45

Hacker News reminds me of my first year of med school. Everyone is smart and fundamentally clueless about human pathophysiology. It's a wonderful thing, learning about the fruits of devilishly challenging science. But it's also a conspiratorial time. I suspect the reason is that first year med students suddenly feel empowered by the small amounts of knowledge that they have gained. HNers probably feel empowered for a…

>This current article discusses how someone was denied funding for human trials of stem cell therapy despite the fact that it cured T1D in animal models

Weissman is not "someone". He is one of the founding fathers of the stem cell field and has done amazing thing. He is a leader in the field and got really amazing results with animals. Sorry to say that but you sound like the first year student here.

Re: Scientist who cured type I Diabetes in mice was denied funding for human trials

#98

Post by detst »

grandalf wrote: post #92
detst wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not really fair. The government funds more than "development of military technology".

What percentage of the technologies that people cite as being made possible by the government were developed for non-military purposes? Edit: The NSF started out as a way of enhancing military research: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation

What's wrong with the NSF starting that way? Are they not a significant source of funds for "basic science" research?

Even if you want to be cynical about this issue, haven't we been doing this long enough to know that research for military purposes often translates to advances in non-military applications?

EDIT: and don't get me wrong; I would love to see some shift in the way funds are allocated.

Re: Scientist who cured type I Diabetes in mice was denied funding for human trials

#99

Post by joe_the_user »

marciovm123 wrote: post #67
carbocation wrote: post #45

Hacker News reminds me of my first year of med school. Everyone is smart and fundamentally clueless about human pathophysiology. It's a wonderful thing, learning about the fruits of devilishly challenging science. But it's also a conspiratorial time. I suspect the reason is that first year med students suddenly feel empowered by the small amounts of knowledge that they have gained. HNers probably feel empowered for a…

Well said. Another failing arises from just how complicated biology is, and how little we understand of it. Unlike in computer programming, in biology reliable layers of abstraction do not yet exist. The equivalent of changing one line of code in a cell's program (through a drug, gene, whatever) in a sense has unknown side-effects on every other line of code. A programmer's approach to working with or trying to under…

in biology reliable layers of abstraction do not yet exist.

In biology, reliable layers of abstraction do not exist. Period.

Biological technologies may arise with enough flexibility and processing power to deal with this situation. But situation itself won't change. Life simply evolved without fixed boundaries to its layers of abstraction. Every bit of evidence we have points to the genetic code as being more akin spaghetti coded assembly language than to any human-comprehensible programming language. Why would the genetic "programming" system respect any layers of abstraction understandable by humans? Life's been chugging away with 4 billion years of "whatever works".

Roge J. Williams' work early in the 20th showed how in just about every single biochemical system in the body, something like 20+% of the population and that with these outliers not correlating, every person's biochemical system actually work in somewhat unique fashion. That is hard manage and control from an engineering perspective, to say the least. See http://www.amazon.com/Biochemical-Individuality-Roger-Willia...

Re: Scientist who cured type I Diabetes in mice was denied funding for human trials

#100

Post by yummyfajitas »

Avshalom wrote: post #91
yummyfajitas wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google had no presence at all in the spreadsheet market in 2005. I guess they really couldn't afford to enter the spreadsheet market. Too bad, because if google had money, and the above rules didn't apply, then google might create a free spreadsheet web service that competes with MS Excel even at the risk of destroying a gigantic cash cow owned by somebody else.

This is about cure versus treat. Google is trying to enter the spreadsheet market, not destroy it. As an analogy Google Docs falls safely on the treatment side of the fence.

Google is trying to get 100% of the spreadsheet market with the goal of selling ads and maybe some corporate subscriptions.

If successful, they will destroy a vastly larger market (commercial spreadsheet software). Google would rather have 100% of a small pie than 0% of a big pie.

Similarly, Diabetes Cure, Inc would rather have 100% of the diabetes cure market than 0% of the insulin market, even if the latter market is bigger.

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