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The million-dollar drug (2018)

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Re: The million-dollar drug (2018)

#91
post #28

Price should be based on cost of production, not on how often the drug is needed. So stupid not to make it available because someone was crazy to price it that high.

A drug with high cost of production that’s not needed very often will cost a lot of money per dose. The article mentions that hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on R&D and clinical trials, and maybe a couple thousand people in the first world have this disorder. Development costs have to be recouped entirely off of first world sales, since the rest of the world isn’t going to ever pay any appreciable amount o…

Interesting, so you're saying that medical advances in the first world are being sabotaged by the fact that the rest of the world is poor?

I wish people weren't so short sighted when it comes to economic cooperation.

Re: The million-dollar drug (2018)

#92
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who are you referring to in your 80% example? Also, what do you mean by purged? Do you mean stopping manufacturing of an approved product? No company is gonna cut a an approved drug with hundreds of million in net profit because the % profit is <80. I could see them cutting drugs if the total profit is low tho. This helps them focus on other more profitable drugs with. That is to say, most companies don't want to be…

I will not disclose the company name. With purged I mean exactly this. Purged. 80% was low from their point of view. Don't know how many products they had. Couldn't believe it at all.

Sounds like I see it as more believable than you, but with the caveats that I added in my parent company. I doubt <80% was the only reason and any of the products were massive revenue makers.

Re: The million-dollar drug (2018)

#93

Similar drug still on the market: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onasemnogene_abeparvovec

So they solved the problem of paying one million dollars with an already developed drug by making a new drug that costs... $2.125 million.

"Novartis' Zolgensma, a one-time gene therapy for spinal muscular atrophy tops the list with a price tag of $2.125 million."

https://www.biospace.com/article/gene-therapy-zolgensma-tops...

Re: The million-dollar drug (2018)

#94
post #25

How long does the patent last? It should be made available as a generic drug when the exclusivity period elapses, right?

They usually last around 10 years with some options to extend for another 5-10 years. By the way, that's one of the reasons drugs are so expensive: pharma co. needs to recoup the costs before the patents expire.

The flip side of patent expiration is that a rival company would need the infrastructure and capability of manufacturing the drug.

For something like Aspirin, that's not a high bar to clear, an avid experimenter could probably do that in their basement, but for gene therapy drugs I feel confident in saying that it's orders of magnitude higher.

Then again, they could kickstarter it and say that if they get X orders or raise Y money they'll do it, make and sell the 20-30k doses for everyone and then close up shop with a healthy profit.

Re: The million-dollar drug (2018)

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

India has been doing this for decades. Somehow the global pharmaceutical industry didn't collapse despite of Indian drugs being exported for very cheap. It's just a lie, one of very many we tell ourselves.

The lie people tell themselves is that because India does it, everyone could do it without disrupting the rate at which new drugs are researched and brought to market. As I’ve discussed in other comments, this is why pharma companies have to recover their entire investment off of sales in the first world. The rest of the world is never going to buy their drugs at a price that would make the R&D spending worthwhile. T…

"Peter Bach, a researcher at Memorial Sloan Kettering, and his colleagues compared prices of the top 20 best-selling drugs in the United States to the prices in Europe and Canada. They found that the cumulative revenue from the price difference on just these 20 drugs more than covers all the drug research and development costs conducted by the 15 drug companies that make those drugs—and then some"

https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20170307.05903...

"To put the excess revenue in perspective, lowering the magnitude of the US premium to a level where it matches global R&D expenditures across the 15 companies we assessed would have saved US patients, businesses, and taxpayers approximately $40 billion in 2015, a year for which the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) reported that total US spending on pharmaceuticals was $325 billion."

Seems there is a room for another India at least.

Re: The million-dollar drug (2018)

#96
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure exactly, but considering alcohol messes with hormonal signaling I'm guessing it throws something out of balance Edit: Looked up the wiki article, here is their explanation; >Additional measures are avoidance of agents known to increase endogenous triglyceride levels, such as alcohol

Thx. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23511381/ Probably more pertinent: Alcohol changes the structure of the liver cells and slows down the liver’s ability to process fats. This is the second way that triglycerides begin to accumulate and the levels rise. This is also the beginning of fatty liver disease. https://findpulse.com/what-liquor-raises-your-triglycerides-...

Oh interesting find. Makes sense
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