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Antibiotic Resistant Staph Antibiotic Discovered
edward.virtually@pob writes "CNN is reporting that a team of scientists has discovered an extremely effective killer of the antibiotic resistant form of staph infection occuring naturally in rock pools. Unfortunately, despite the obvious cheap potential availability of this cure, do not expect it to be cheaply available. The employer of the scientists, AquaPharm Bio-Discovery Limited, the story notes 'is keeping the identity of its MRSA-killing bacteria a closely guarded secret, and taken out patents on how they can be cultivated and used.' Oh well."
...is to make make of of the sick.
Other excellent ways are weapons of mass destruction and reality shows.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I see nothing wrong with pantenting the process so long as the patent isn't abused.
Remember claritin before the FDA deemed it fine to go over the counter? It was stupifying the price drop.
I hope these people don't find the cure for AIDS. That would be one that would be ethically/morally wrong to abuse.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Why would anyone expect that a company would spend all the time and resources to discover a new cure, only to release it to the public? If they weren't going to try and make money from the effort, they would probably never have attempted it in the first place.
To quote Cartman, "Damn hippies."
So the company that discovered it wants to profit from their discovery. Big deal. If this were a disease that was epidimic, this would be a problem, and the government might just aquire the antibiodic from them. But this disease is so rare it doesn't matter that much. How many people do you know with resistant staph?
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
About these pharmaceutical companies that are more
than willing to sell off their discoveries to the
highest bidder instead of doing what's right for
humanity. I mean, for christ sakes. How vampirical
is it to put profit about human lives? I think
Chris Rock said something to the effect that we
haven't cured a disease in 50 some odd years, but
we used to do it twice a week. It's really sad.
The most important thing any republican needs to know.
we'll just encounter the problem of Staph becoming resistant to this compound once other pharmaceutical companies begin to manufacture similar products to try to undercut AquaPharm.
There is in fact a perfectly good MRSA killer out there already - bleach. Not much use once you are infected, but an ounce of prevention, etc. Here in the UK we need the government to get hospitals to focus more on basic hygiene, rather then forcing them to hire more managers to figure out ways of fiddling the figures to meet the latest (meaningless) government target.
At least the government here have set themselves a goal of a 6% reduction in the number of targets set per year...
Help children born unable to swallow - www.tofs.org.uk
I only had to read the headline 3 times before I understood it :-)
Check out my sysadmin blog!
I find it horribly disturbing that drugs are such an inflated resource. It is as if staying alive deserves to be paid for! Remind me next time to tell those people who kidnap people for ransom (and shoot them if they don't get the money) are doing something completely legal since those people's lives have a money amount on them as well. Drug's are the one thing a government should confiscate from the hands of private enterprise so that it would serve the needs of the public. Welcome to medical communism I suppose.
Bleach! We've just got to figure out how to make it not kill our blood cells along with the staphococcus whateverus bacterium. And since bleach resistant bugs are so rare (but not non-existant), we've got at least ten years before we'll need any sort of super-bleach to kill resistant diseases.
Once again natures IP is hijacked and restricted to those who have got the money.
Of course once use becomes widespread and bacteria/virus adapt and mutate we'll be back to the biological arms race. We wouldn't such a problem if doctors were not so quick to prescribe Anti-biotics for every thing and all hygiene products were not anti-bacterial.
We live to clean now. We need some dirt and grime so that are bodies produce their own defences. Reliance on science could kill us all yet.
Hmmmmm how glib a reply for a Friday afternoon (UK).
Have a good weekend all.
"Things that you own end up owning you" - Tyler Durden (via Diogenes of Sinope).
Many resistant forms of bacteria have evolved due to overuse of antibiotica. If the process itself is closely regulated we can at least hope that the drug itself will be closely regulated as well. That way it will hopefully be used when it is really needed, and only when it is really needed, thus reducing the risks of resistant bacteria evolving.
.: Max Romantschuk
the government(people) should put a lot more funding into universities for that kind of research.
If your nationally pickey then create a national patent system with free use in your country but licensed to other countries.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
They'll be preventivley prescribing this stuff in bucketloads to soccer kids before you know it. I predict that staph becomes resistant to this before the patent expires - possibly before it's available in Canada and Mexico.
That brings up a terrifying prospect. The drug company will actually have financial incentive for the bacteria to become resistant again just as the patent runs out. Should be easy enough to accomplish with free samples and advertising. Ghastly.
The problem is the drug should be _regulated_ not _patented_. i.e. the patient taking the drug should obtain it in a reasonable price, but he should be put in isolation in a biosafety-level-whatever center for diagnosis & treatment.
There's a bug in the story:
>AquaPharm is keeping the identity of its MRSA-killing
>bacteria a closely guarded secret, and taken out patents
>on how they can be cultivated and used.
It doesn't make sense. The purpose of the patent system
is to grant limited monopoly in exchange for the
*publication* of the invention. You can't patent it and
keep it a secret.
Also, the sentence is grammatically incorrect. I suspect
some editor at CNN did his job of mangling the story
until it says the opposite of what the journalist intended...
The reason they are keeping this Bacteria secret has nothing to do with high prices a rofits..
Our current antibiotic empidemic was caused by over prescribing anitbiotics through the last 50 years..
If too much of thi sbacteria is used its targeted bacteria will evolve a counter measure that is fqar worse and that we do not have a cure for!!
Don't Tread on OpenSource
...that none of the pharmaceutical companies is really interested in curing a desease any more. For them selling a real cure to an illness is almost an unwanted side-effect which stops business.
We more and more come to the point where we need medicaments to deal with the real side-effects of other medicaments. Sort of 2nd generation medicaments...
With all the complaining about how the USPTO awards this or that patent for the obvious things, it's this patenting of medicinces which I find the most anti-social. It's like, "I'm going to discover something which may save lives, but I want the ability to restrict, for profit, how it gets used." Makes me feel my healthcare premiums aren't so much an insurance policy as a licensing fee. While I feel people do need compensation for their efforts, I feel any kind of patent awarded on medicines or medical treatments should have a much limited scope. I.e. any pharmacutical should be allowed to produce the medication with a minimal fee. Otherwise we become embroiled in these debates, like africans can't afford this or that because they cannot afford it, so they die, and it's a fait acompli massacre or genocide.
And then there's the separate issue of this antibiotic: how long before staph is resistant to it, too.
The best thing I ever did to fight respiratory infections was to stop eating antibiotic laden meat.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
We live in a capitalist system. Companies that don't operate in a profit-making model die faster than staph-infected peasants. Perhaps this sucks but it's our system. If a company comes up with a miracle cure at the expense of millions of dollars, should its next move be to give it all away and go out of business? The solution is for the government to subsidize the cost of the cure so sick people can afford it. In a free market system, big business has no mandate to look out for anybody's well being. That's where the government is supposed to come in.
In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane. -Oscar Wilde
For everyone who is complaining that this company wants to make money off of this, I believe there are two scenarios: 1. This company gets a patent, the drug is intially expensive and some people benefit from it immediately. Eventually the patent expires, generic forms are produced and nearly everyone benefits from it. 2. No one benefits from this drug...ever. The article states that this discovery was made by a team of 5 scientists. Figuring the costs of an employee is usually at least twice that of the salary, I'm guessing this company is spending over $1 million a year for labor alone (also consider lab costs, other non-scientists labor,etc.) If it feasible for non-profit groups to be making these types of discoveries, why do are they not? I don't know about you, I definitely prefer the
Of course I didn't read the artcile, but maybe there is a good side-effect to the fact that that they are motivated by profit, as all corporations are and must be.
Isn't one of the problems with antibiotics that they become ineffective because they are too widely prescribed? Having it be used less because of cost could keep it effective longer, until the bacteria out-evolve it.
I know that is pretty useless to you if you can't get it.
It is the companies right to patent their discoveries and to charge what they want to those that want to buy it. After all, they invested the time, money , and resources into its discovery. Also, it would be rather hypocritical for a capitalistic system to say "Hey, you've done the hard work, but you will reap no benefits. Instead, the people who need this will be charged a price deemed appropriate." Though this would benefit society as a whole, the corporation would flounder (we call that socialism^^). ....
So when does the needs of the many outway the needs of the few? And where does the gov't stand on such issues? Traditionally, the american gov't has felt that "what is good for business is good for america." Yet, such functions as the FDA have been known to step in and not deem the drugs safe for use until the price drops
But then again, why shouldn't the corporation be allowed to charge as they please. After all, if not for their efforts and funds, the discovery may have never have been made and even more would suffer. Why should those who can afford the cure not enjoy their luxury, and the poor realize that there are many things they cannot afford, why should this be any different.
Of course, this would look bad from a humanitarian stance.
YOU SUCK BALLS!
I still find it funny that the healthiest lifestyle is to be filthy; the more crap your exposed to the stronger your immune system becomes. This includes allergies too Of course, it's still a double edged sword because, if your immune system gets knocked out for some other reason (injury, AIDS, etc) then you're really hosed.
I mean, how ofter does your dog get sick? Nearly never, probably because he has his nose in all kinds of shit on a daily basis.
This type of development requires lots of up front money, with only a statistical likelihood of success. If you want this money to come from investors, they need to see a pot of gold potentially at the end. The only alternative is for the money to come from the government or charitable foundations. Actually, in the real world, funding is from a mix of these sources. However, if you cut back patenting as we now know it, you have to push the funding much more toward public sources, which has its own set of problems.
I don't think many people are ready to completely socialize health-care related R&D. What a scary thought.
the antibiotic resistant form of staph infection occuring naturally in rock pools.
.. oh.. wait, don't tell me - it was discovered by a man with a wooden leg named Bob, right?
So does this mean that if you don't want to get this type of staph infection, you just don't go to rock pools?
"I hope these people don't find the cure for AIDS. That would be one that would be ethically/morally wrong to abuse."
But they could have discovered a cure for Aids or Cancer, and by withholding it they could make millions, while millions die.
It's just stupid to think that it is fair to allow an artificial monopoly on important discoveries because it is an incentive to develop more. Most of these patents are for these which nature has spent millions of years perfecting. The first person who comes along and notices it does not deserve an artificial monopoly on a natural drug.
From article:
"It's essentially beachcombing," said Dr David.
"We go for whatever we think is likely to be of interest. There are certain sites to look for -- basically it's down to experience."
---
So, they haven't created anything themselves, they are just stealing a natural antibiotic that took millions of years to evolve naturally to do the job.
If the person who discovered penicillin patented it, where would medicine be today?
...and not a tech to tink.
We spend a lot of time bitching about software patents around here. Drug patents are worse, though. There's a difference, in that (to my knowledge) most drug patents involve more actual research and investment than the chikenshit software and business method patents we see. However, this doesn't change the fact that drug patents are not only killing our economy, but they're also unethical and immoral.
Killing our economy you say? Hello? Pharmaceutical industries are one of the most profitable sectors of the economy, and doubtless most of us have mutual funds highly bolstered by investments in pharmaceutical companies. Well, fine, but look at the bigger picture. Health care costs are spiraling. The reason? Part of it is due to spiraling drug prices. And drug prices are expensive because they're proprietary; once you can get a generic substitute, drugs come much cheaper. They would be much cheaper to start with if generics were available sooner. And that would take a huge burden off of employer sponsored health plans (which are getting more expensive and covering less), not to mention state and federal health plans which are in serious trouble even as we're talking about adding a perscription drug plan to medicate. Every "cost saving" plan I see just shifts the costs around, it doesn't address any of the reasons why the costs are too high. Eliminating pharmaceutical patents would address that reason.
Unethical and immoral? That one's more obvious. Never mind the poor folk in our country (I'm in the USA) who can't afford the drugs. Never mind our law enforcement agencies leaning on Canada to clamp down on the people from the USA who cross the border to get the drugs they need at a price they can afford. Just look at the millions in Africa dying of AIDS. At international AIDS conferences, our country, our democratic leaders who represent us, have to stand up and say that it's important that American intellectual property be protected. We can't give the drugs away, we can't just allow anybody who can put together a production line to make them. (Which itself can be expensive, but much less than what you pay when you're also paying the patent.) So as to protect our precious intellectual property, we have to argue to the world that it's better to let the poor people of poor countries die. Is this really what we as a nation want to be standing up to the world and saying?
Fine, you will object, I've got my head in the clouds. Developing drugs is expensive. Without the patent protection that allows companies to get a return on their investment, there never would have been the investment in the first place. If I eliminate drug patents, I will also eliminate all the new drugs I was trying to make afforadable, the argument will go. Well, maybe, but it's not so obvious to me. What is obvious is that the current system is both untenable and immoral, and so therefore we have to ask what else we can do. Consider the goverment investing much more heavily in health research than it does now. More government spending? Maybe-- we should find out if that spending would really be that much more once we factor in the savings that will come from the much cheaper drugs our federal health care programs will be purchasing. Additionally, I believe that already right now the government funds a fair amount of drug research, including some for drugs that end up patented. Given the ills of the current system, we have ask if something else can be done.
Unfortunately, we won't. Pharmaceutical companies are rich, and thus highly influential. Plus, I'm talking about killing them; not the researchers, not the people doing the valuable work, but I am talking about removing the ability for those who aren't actually doing the work to profit from us. (Obviously, the drug research is important, so any replacement system would have to have a way to employ and pay those who are actually developing the new drugs.) And it goes deeper than that; it's all of us with our mutual funds heavily invested in pharmaceutical companies. Killing drug patents would probably send our country into a crushing recession for several years as all of those fund tanked. But I sincerely believe that if done right, the country that emerged out of the other end would both be more economically sound and more moral.
In the mean time, drug costs will continue to spiral upward, more and more people are going to have a harder and harder time affording health care, and our leaders are going to have to argue to the world that the crucial interests American economy require us to allow people in other unimportant countries to die of various diseases.
-Rob
A high price means that it will work better.
Nope, I'm not kidding.
The whole reason that we have a problem with antibiotic-resistant germs is that cheap, widely available antobiotics are grossly overused. The find their way into so many products as a preventive measure (everything from meat to anti-bacterial hand soaps) that new strains have evolved and spread.
So if the price is kept high the new antiboitics will be more likely to be used when it is appropriate and 20 years from now we will be less likely to have strains that are resistant to this drug.
You don't mean an antibiotic resistant antibiotic resistant staph do you?
AquaPharm are now responsible for the lives of the people who could be cured by an otherwise readily available antibiotic that they are keeping secret.
No better way to shame them then to state simple facts, and expose the consequences of their greed.
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
that's how they stick around to find more cures. there's no such thing as a free lunch, people. i wish it were different, but it's not.
The wise follow a damned path, for to know is to be forsaken.
For many years, alcohol has been recognized as an excellent disinfectant. It kills germs and viruses without exception. I strongly recommend taking in large quantities of Guinness Stout or if you live in Manitoba, Canada; Fort Garry Dark Ale.
You're be helping the economy and keeping yourself safe from bioterror attack.
This has been another public service message from GrubCo.
Trolling is a art,
The article tells you all you need to know. If you have this disease, go lick slimy rocks in a tidal pool.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
wouldn't it just be easier to take any people with the staph infection and dump them in a rock pool in Scotland???
Just think about why we had the problem with antibiotic-resistant staph in the first place: overuse of antibiotics. While in the old days antibiotics where reserved for serious diseases, nowadays, they are prescribed for the smallest flu and the faintest cough.
Keeping this new wonder medicine patented will ensure that it will stay expensive enough that it will only be used when really needed. Or else we might get some Antibiotic resistant staph antibiotic antibiotic resistant staph...
Since you don't have a clue, here's one: anti-biotic resistant staph (and many other bacteria) are a growing problem in EVERY HOSPITAL ACROSS THE CONTINENT. It is a disaster waiting to happen. The overuse and abuse of antibiotics over the past several decades has allowed these bacteria to mutate and develop strong resistances to conventional antibiotics.
Think "tuberculosis". Think "making a comeback". Think "antibiotic resistant". Got it now? I don't relish a return to the days of the "sanitorium" for the sick, do you? This "patent" should be struck down and the new antibiotic delivered to the world at large, without a huge price-tag. Enough is enough--profits over the health of the public is immoral. Think "South African AIDS epidemic" and how the US drug companies would rather make huge profits off of people with little or no money, rather than help end a horrible epidemic.
Seems to me that there is not enough information in the CNN report to say how good a discovery this is. One of the side effects with certain antibiotics is that they kill too much, kill off little hair cells in the guts of your ear and make you go deaf. Nothing is said about the effects of this new drug on the patient.
And anyway, there's already an antibiotic effective against MRSA - I think it's called vancomycin.
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit!
Where '???' is protected by the DMCA and any attempts to discover it will be prosecuted.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
This story was poorly worded, in my opinion. Everyone get off your self righteous horse and take a look at the same story on bbc:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/2803451.stm
I think it's important to realize that in the commercial world, patents are needed to protect a discovery like this.
In the medical world, if this was not patented, all of the big drug co's would find a way to manufacture this and kick it out the door at $100 a pill.
If that were to happen, the staph bacteria that it does fight would become resistant, just like our current problems with penicillin becoming ineffective.
Our medication breeds better germs through natural selection. It's important to protect the drug from being mass administered because it is so useful in fighting a non-resistant strain.
taking out patents keeps the big drug companies from manufacturing them en masse. This would be an important drug to keep under control because if its unusual properties, I think.
we can't afford to make the same mistakes we do with other antibiotics if there is a "super" antibiotic discovery.
The mainstream media always seems to be showing articles about doctors over-prescribing antibiotics (because people desperately want antibiotics even if they don't help against viruses and whatnot). This has led to the decreasing effectiveness of penicillin, and recently vancomyacin (sp?) has met some resistant strains of bacteria.
Although this is no comfort to people that might benefit from the use of a new bacteria killer, and most people will assume that this conglorporation is trying to abuse the patent process (it's so easy, it seems), perhaps it would be better to let this company keep the product under tight wraps for now. Although I don't know much about the lengthy, complex process involved in taking a new antibiotic from the lab to the pharmacy, this might allow time for organizations and associations to maintain the effectiveness of the antibiotic for as long as possible.
Then again, this company might not be altruistic at all, but it is their money that has paved the way for the development of this new antibiotic, so again, it's all a matter of perspective.
You know full well I wasn't suggesting they just
GIVE them away. But for christ sakes, you have to
agree that the money is in treating the disease,
not curing it. They know that, we know that, and you
have to know that. The current business model
involves sucking every last dollar out of a new
wonder medicine and inflating the cost no matter
how many people die because they can't pony up
the sheckles.
The most important thing any republican needs to know.
As a Staph researcher, I should say that it's wonderful that there's a new promising antibiotic out there, BUT we have no information on a) how effective it is on different strains of Staph b) if it's specific to Staph or to a wide variety of bacteria or MOST importantly c) if it's toxic to humans. The last thing you want is to get sicker while taking it.
So treat this more as a press release, less as a scientific discovery until the peer reviewed articles and FDA approval phases start.
Niles
VRSA - Vancomycin Resistant S. aureus
h 1/ diseases/activities/activity5_vrsa-database.htm
http://science.education.nih.gov/supplements/ni
..Now there is yet another drug that patients can abuse because they believe it will help them get rid of a cold.
Though I've yet to see any clinical research supporting the theory that abusing antibiotics creats drug resistant strains of bacteria, the fact still remains that many, many, many patients force their doctors to prescribe them un-needed antibiotics for viral infections. If you dont believe me, try reading the sci.med.* newsgroups or WebMD message boards. I would not want to be a doctor during the height of the cold/flu season..
I lost my concept of community when my community lost all concept of me.
It might be a little difficult to closely regulate the process of evolution though.
A spectacular trick if you can pull it off... worthy of a nobel or two!
Although this is a really great event to be able to kill certain bacteria that are resistant to current antibiotics, I'm just very skeptical as to how long the bacteria will remain susceptible to the antibiotic. Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) has resulted from the use of traditional antibiotics. Originally, Penicillin, and later Methicillin, were able to treat 99% of bacterial infections resulting from staph aureus.
Since bacteria grow so rapidly, that 1% of bacterium that were resistant to methicillin proliferated and became common. When blasted with antibiotics, bacteria have a tendency to become resistant.
Vancomycin Resistant Enterococci are another common resistant strain of bacteria. Vancomycin is an extremely powerful antibiotic, given only by IV, and even this drug is not effective against certain infections.
I feel that this is a great discovery, however I think it will be short lived. Staph aureus will become resistant to this new drug.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
I guess they can't call it antibiotic-resistant Staph anymore?
"People should be allowed to keep midgets as pets."
- Gov. Jesse Ventura
One of the problems with antibiotics, and the reason why there are antibiotic resistant staph infections in the first place is people think antibiotics should be in hand creme, and that they should be daubed all over the place whenever little Johnnie gets a cut. The abuse of the 'power' of antibiotics is the reason this discovery is so expensive in the first place.
This antibiotic will hopefully be kept expensive, even if artificially so, to keep it from becoming another thing patients DEMAND from their doctors. If we spread it widely and freely over the whole planet and used it to treat any trivial discomfort, it would cease to have ANY value in short order, and be useless for saving lives.
- murderers
- murderess
- murderous
My kind of company! Buy! Buy! Buy!I have a question for the fellow who submitted this story: do you have any info that we don't? You've gone and claimed that this cure won't be readily / cheaply available, but I didn't find that information anywhere in the article. And now everyone else has gone off talking about how horrible pharmaceutical companies are. Like it or not, they do have the right to make money. If you want to spend your life trying to find cures for diseases and give them away, all the best to you, but these companies are in no way obligated to do the same. And NOWHERE in the linked article does it say that they plan to charge exorbitant fees for their findings. It simply says that they're patenting it. Good for them. Once it's protected by a patent they can go ahead and finish their research and develop some good drugs. Then, and only then, *if* they artificially limit availability or charge ridiculous ammounts of money for it, can you judge them. But we can always hope that they'll make a fair profit on it that they can use to do more research and that'll be it.
do not read this line twice.
thank you very much for not being as stupid as everyone else.
have a nice day!
Until a staph which is resistant to "Antibiotic Resistant Staph Antibiotic" will be discovered?
So, they're supposed to spend millions of dollars on research that has a small chance of actually generating a cure, and then, when they find one, just give it away, and not try to recoup all of the costs? This is not the way it works, and there's nothing wrong with expecting a return on your investment.
Any observer of any part of human history should be able to tell you the same thing blues singers have told you for years: "them that's got, gets" The Bible says it in proverbs written thousands of years ago, for crying out loud!
Every human society that has ever existed has had a priviledged few increasing their comforts at the expense of others. Marxism didn't fix this, Naziism didn't fix it, and Democracy doesn't fix it either. Selfishness and greed are parts of human nature, and though they may not be the most admirable parts of humanity, they do drive scientific progress fairly efficiently, when exploited properly.
The patent system in "our brand of capitalism" is just one way of exploiting selfishness to bring good to everybody. Even if 14 years seems like a huge amount of time, it means that 86 of the next 100 years get to use this for free. (Unlike copyrighted works, which if copyrighted today will still be restricted 100 years from now, but that's another rant.)
The requested URL
I read a while back that the antibiotic approach to dealing with bacteria will always result in resistant strains of that bacteria. You can mitigate the problem by ensuring people take the full course of antibiotics, but eventually resistant strains will emerge.
The article went on to note that a diferent approach seemed to be 100% effective in killing bacteria.
Bacteriophages.
Very simply if you take sample from the places that a particular strain of a bacteria is known to be present - an then alalyse these samples - you will eventually find a virus that simply eats the bacteria. Cultivate large amounts of the virus, and you can use it to kill the bacteria.
The article highlighted the Russians who, during the cold war, became quite good with Bateriophages. But that problems with patents and financing prevented the commercial exploitation
of their knowlegebase.
From what I could understand bacteriophage development is so simple, it would be impossible to make any money out of it.
Can't make any money out of it?!!?
Makes you think.
Do you mind, your karma has just run over my dogma.
AquaPharm Bio-Discovery ... 'is keeping the identity of its MRSA-killing bacteria a closely guarded secret, and taken out patents ...' Oh well."
Sure, both the patent and medical regulatory agencies (FDA in particular) have their flaws. for my $0.02 there are far more wierdness in the medical industry (where I have 20 years engineering experience) than in the software industry (which is far less entrenched *at this point*).
It takes most of a *decade* to get a prescription drug approved for marketing. Since much of this research is performed by US companies, and the US market is willing to spend *tons* of money keeping people with unhealthy life-styles alive, it needs to be done to meet FDA regulations. (This is the agency which, a generation later is still justifying its existence on the basis of a beaurocratic snafu which kept Thalidomide from being sold in the US).
Furthermore the vast majority of active medical drug treatments are 'discovered' natural agents (hence the name of the company in question <doh>!). There's nothing special or new about the drug companies researching/patenting biochemical compounds.
If people want something to actually be concerned about, maybe think on sub-saharan Africa who's population is being decimated (in the modern sense) by HIV, or the continuing loss of the very biodiversity which enables this kind of research.
But it's much easier to cherish your gas guzzling / ugly / high pollution SUV or sit back and play with all the toys you can get at ThinkGeek && bitch about all those 'rich fuckers' abusing the patent process or 'killing people' by working in medical research than to actually effect change.
Linux is Linux, if One need clarify their dist: <Dist>/GNU Linux
bsds are of course just BSD
In this case, I feel like they filed for a patent to save humanity from itself. We as a species are overusing antibiotics. They don't just go away when they exit our bodies, or when the pills, cleaners, feed and fertilizer adjuncts expire. They wash out into the ecosystem where they definitely kill a lot of bacteria... but this is the dark point.
They get weakened and find a culture that has mutated, or is ready to mutate - and it survives. Not only does it live on, but it thrives because it's competition has been wiped out.
Now when that super-bug comes back to knock on your door, it laughs at your antibiotic treatments.
I would prefer to have a certain class of treatment guarded behind intellectual property laws. I would prefer to see doses of that treatment be rather expensive, so that Joe Sixpack isn't sprinkling it on his lawn, and flooding his watershed with the substance - almost dredging out recruits for the next generation of biowars.
Instead, it should be reserved for last-case scenarios, and applied in surgical strike fashion.
- passion
Scientists discover new chemically manufactured antibiotics nearly as often as you check /. These antibiotics work. And then they don't, because the target adapts, as evolution demands of it.
That is the source of all these antibiotic resistant "superbugs." Staph adapted to the treatments we threw at it before, it will do so again.
Doing the Right Thing should not be preempted by making a buck.
I don't condone price gouging by the pharmaceutical industry, but if this product is expensive and it prompts doctors to use it as a last resort, then it certainly will forstall the day when natural selection delivers us bacteria that are resistant to it.
yea i stole your sig- whats the big deal, it sucked anyway.
The solution is simple: compulsory RAND licensing for any technology which has been proven to heal people. Let them make their money, but force them to share the benefits with everyone. Given the choice between compulsory licensing and denial of patent protectect, I think most companies would choose the licensing.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
This is exactly what's wrong with captilaism in it's current form.
I don't have a good answer as to how this type of thing can be fixed, but I have kicked around a few ideas. Bear with me here:
Human greed should be considered inalienable. It's been here since we were throwing crap at each other from trees, and it's not going anywhere. Capitalism plays on this...hoard as big a pile of cash as you can manage.
In a lot of respects, capitalism is a great system (better than others we've seen, anyway)...My feeling is that the 'currency' needs to be changed. Instead of dollars, why not hoard 'social credits'.
For example, a big drug company like this could improve its reputation by releasing this info for the benefit of the human race, and then collecting 'social credits'.
Obviously, this is a very rough idea, and other's have possibly thought along the same lines (I'm no economic scholar)...
What we need is a system that encourages competition (that's how we get the best products), while at the same time also encourages benefitting the human population in any manner possible.
I'd be interested to hear any theories, opinions and or ideas on the subject, just hit that reply button.
-Ben
I know, rather than have pharmaceutical companies exist to make money by inventing and selling new drugs, let's let someone else do it. How about NADA, the National Anti Disease Administration. They could use 30 year old technology to achieve cures for diseases few people have, they could kill people because they measured their doses in ounces but prescribed them in cc's (yeah, that's a cheap shot), they could have to fight for every dollar every year in congress, and be forced to fund showy programs so they aren't viewed as irrelevant.
Or maybe we could just expect the researcher to be like teachers. We could pay them insufficiently, give them terrible working conditions, make them buy their own supplies, and blame them when all the diseases arent cured.
Maybe some genius out there has a better system, but so far, there's plenty of evidence that capitalism gets stuff done, even if it is imperfect.
I also, btw, agree with the poster who pointed out it is good this is expensive, so it doesn't get over used.
Correction misuse of antibiotics, if anything.
Resistant strains may arise simply because the biotics are effective; killing off the susceptible strains and leaving the resistant strains to flourish in environments presumeably with less competition. This has nothing to do with misuse of or overuse.
The biggest threat is when the antibiotic users don't take their treatments to completion.
Keeping this new wonder medicine patented will ensure that it will stay expensive enough that it will only be used when really needed.
Why stop there. There are lots of other medical procedures that would 'benefit' from this arguement. There are tons of viruses ( I'm not going to argue that one ) and bacteria out there. Why not make *all* of their treatments only available to the rich.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
It all makes sense now! They need to make this new
wonder drug as expensive as possible to protect us.
I'm sure that's exactly what they were thinking too.
The though of making a huge ass profit didn't factor
in at all. What a bunch of nice guys.
The most important thing any republican needs to know.
Why only appear stupid when you can post and remove all doubt.
NOT readily available. This is not a case of Aquapharm finding a cure like "rub some dirt on it" and trying to patent it. Just because the source is "naturally occuring" does not mean the final product "grows on trees".
They have found a unique way of extracting an antibody from an uncommon source.
---"What did I say that sounded like 'Tell me about your day?'"---
Its 'Antibiotic-resistant' - a compound adjective, so it is hyphenated. I had to read the header twice to figure out what it meant.
Its the same difference as 'Man eating shark' (in a restaurant) and 'Man-eating shark' (in trouble).
Baz
Am I the only one that wonders about a bacteria capable of producing an antibiotic so much stronger and effective than anything previously known?
Might it not be effective, too, in killing other kinds of beneficial cells, too?
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Mod up parent. TANSTAAFL.
The last thing we want is for this to become cheap and widely available. It will have to be expensive because we don't want anyone to get it until there it is proven that a particular case of MRSA is resistant to all existing antibiotics. And then, we only want it given on those particular cases. Thus, the costs of having found it, which could have been in the billions since its the cost of every project looking for naturally occurring drugs divided by the number of successes, and the cost of figuring out how to cultivate it, purify it, and of testing it all have to be defrayed against (hopefully) no more than a few thousands of cases.
Its the fact that the antibiotics are too widely and easily available today that has caused this crisis. Now that a possible way out has been discovered, you propose to destroy it by making it cheap and widely available. Will we ever learn our lessons?
Colloidal silver is cheap and works better than antibiotics.
I'm an advocate of treating oneself whenever possible. I think of AMA doctors as dupes of the pharmaceutical industry. I would only go to a doctor for something I couldn't fix myself like a broken bone or something.
A dyslexic man walks into a bra.
In "Antibiotic Resistant Staph Antibiotic Discovered", "Antibiotic Resistant" should definetly be "Antibiotic-Resistant" in order to minimize confusion. I know it's cool to drop dashes in stuff, b u t h o w w o u l d y o u l i k e i t i f I w r o t e l i k e this?
Exactly. Needless ambiguity needs to be avoided at all costs.
The Grammar Nazi will shut up now.
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
News at 11.
It was literally 'found' in a rock pool. They stumbled across it.
I think this misrepresents the reality of the ongoing process to locate potentially biologically active compounds, evaluate and catalog their activity, and match the efficacy of a specific agent against a specific need. All of this costs money. The only reason this money gets spent is for a return on investment.
However, there is certainly widespread preccedent and justification for people, acting through the agency of government, to restrict the scope of patents, the duration of patents, and to put caps on drug costs for a variety of justifications. Unfortunately, in the USA we've pretty much buried the topic. Around election time the issue of prescription costs for Seniors is trotted out to woo the AARP crowd and then quickly forgotten.
The issue is not only about patents and money. It is what happens when, after ten or twenty years, this monster-antibiotic saturates the market. What happens when every hospital in the world is using it to disinfect their rooms and their patients? What happens when it is available in a topical, over-the-counter, antibiotic cream that we can all use? The answer is, without a doubt, another monster-bug that is resistant to this monster-antibiotic! This cycle of creating a pill for everything that ails us needs to be addressed, or else we really will be seeing some scary shit in our lifetime.
The question is what kind of rock pool... People have been bathing in heated spring water pools for thousands of years with our race to become technologically superiors we have forgotten our past. Now if we can change the way that we use H/A/V/C in our work places maybe we can prevent offices & cube spaces from becoming flu factories... Why they don't install basic UV lamps inside of air ducts is beyond me, same goes for commuter and cargo transports airplanes...
do you really think the scientific community would accept a pharma company knowingly doing this when a cure was available and locked up under patent?
I'm going to guess one day old.
OF FUCKING COURSE THEY WOULD, for enough money. Jesus. You have no idea how cut-throat and evil the world is. You also have no idea what supposedly rational and sane men will justify doing for money.
Remember claritin before the FDA deemed it fine to go over the counter? It was stupifying the price drop.
I have to say I'm mostly (but not entirely) on the Pharmecuticals side on this issue. You are forgetting a few things
1) the manufacturing of these drugs *once you know how* is generally pretty cheap & easy to do.
2) Discovering these drugs in the first place is the product of some very serious, long-term, hard and *expensive* science.
3) Often finding a way to turn a discovery like this into a drug that is fit for human consumption is perhaps even more difficult and *expensive* - Penicillin was discovered in 1929 but it wasn't until 1945 that someone figured out how to use it as a drug. It usually takes several years of *very expensive* research before they figure out how to use a discovery like this as a drug.
4) Once they have a drug it takes several years of difficult and *very expensive* trials to prove it's effectiveness & safety to the FDA
5) Not all of their expensive initial research, & expensive development of drugs end up being anything.
6) The whole time they've been doing this their patent has been active and ticking down, they have a few years left in their patent to make back their enormous investment. (though they *may/may not* be able to get a patent extension that compensates them for the time it takes to get FDA approval. So, they may get at best 17 years to get a return on their investment or if they fail to get an extension they may have only a couple of years.
7) They are making drugs there is a *huge* risk even after years of *expensive* research and getting FDA approval that a drug may do nasty things to the user over the long term or to a tiny fraction of the population - the result could be lawsuits that costs BILLIONS. It is important to note that this harm doesn't have to be proven scientifically it has to be "proven" in a court of law - One scientist with a pet theory as an expert witness and a handful (out of millions) that have some unexplained syndrome and all the profits from all the drugs produced by hundreds of scientists over dozens of years may end up in the pockets of a few dozen lawyers that "worked" for at most four or five years to "earn" it.
The response to all this is that Pharmecutical companies are *very* profitable - true but they are engaged in a fairly risky investment as a matter of economics high risk has to be balanced with high rewards, otherwise the investment goes elsewhere. If they operated without any profit at all the drugs would be roughly 8-25% less (looking at last years profits vs. revenues) but that obviously woudn't take into account any risks or explain why anyone would bother to undertake the years of research outside of pure altruism - a fine sentiment but not that great as a motivator.
The other response is "if it's a life saving drug it's morally wrong to profit from it". My response to those folks is to ask them if they are willing to make such huge investments themselves without profiting from them. Would YOU be willing to go to school, get an advanced chemistry degree, spend decades of research into the slime floating around rock pools and NOT GET PAID for it.
You do have a point.
A good one.
But when push come to shove this will probably mean that the rich get the cure and the poor (as usual) gets shafted.
There's huge potential for abuse in the patent system.
I hope that won't be the case here.
But misuse of antibiotics also ranks quite high on the 'threats to mankind' list.
This patent properly handled could be a good thing.
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
Also, after reading the article, just because they found it in LABRATORY conditions dosen't mean that it will work out. Thousands of drugs were labratory "stars" and never made it out to market for a variety of reasons. Let's see some real world studies.
Save a Life. Donate Blood. Please.
Right now, the number of people who become inflicted with resistant staph is extemely, extremely low.
What this gives us is the chance to save those few people, and to slow down the progression of "resistant" staph at all, which is something to get excited about it.
"Sig free in '03!"
Disclaimer: The following applies to Canadian/US patent law. IANAUKL.
Patents cannot be granted for things occurring naturally in nature. There have been cases where researchers discovered a cure for a disease in nature, and spent millions of dollars trying to reproduce the substance synthetically. This is because they couldn't patent the original organic material, but they *could* patent a synthetic copy.
Secondly, part of patent law states that in being granted a patent, you must make the product available to the public at reasonable cost. The company that comes up with a cure for AIDS will not be granted a patent for the cure unless it is produced in a lab, and they will not be allowed to charge $200 a pill for it.
Patents are not as unbalanced as some people seem to think. They're actually a good thing. They drive research and provide incentive to invest in new medicines, while keeping the balance of ensuring such medicines will be accessible to all, not just the rich. Particularly here in Canada, where we have universal health care.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
I work in a small company offering services to the pharmaceutical (aka "life science companies").
First off, it comes as absolutely NO suprise that they are keeping this close to heart. These people keep their birthdates and surnames close to heart. The only place you can possibly find a higher level of paranoia is probably at the annual DefCon.
Second, the pharmaceutical industry NEEDS TO TAKE OUT PATENTS TO SURVIVE.
Developing one new drug costs hundreds of millions of dollars. If the drug turns out to be a complete failure near the end of the project (i.e. clinical testing on animals/humans), then they've wasted those hundreds of millions of dollars. That means they have to make a decent profit on their successes, otherwise one or two failures would send them straight out of business.
If they didn't patent and protect their discoveries that would mean some other company could just start producing the drug themselves, and as they didn't spend all that money on developing it, competitive pricing is not exactly a problem and again the inventor is driven out of business.
Either have your government use some of your tax money to fund this sort of research, or just accept the facts:
1. We need medicine.
2. Medicine is insanely expensive to develop.
3. That means it will eventually cost you.
All the people that are nagging on about how "all medicine should be freely available to everyone around the world", please take a moment and understand that if it was free then there wouldn't be any medicine in the first place. Yes the pharmaceutical industry does make a good profit, but it's needed to finance the failures.
So, the staph antiobitic is antibiotic resistant?
And staph infections occur naturally in rock pools?
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
Even if one accepts the argument that the pace of medical progress has slowed, that's not necessarily an argument against capitalism. Maybe the initial discoveries were easier? We've been working on cancer for most of this century, but most of the progress has been made recently, not back in the early days (when you believe things were done right). In fact, as the price of research becomes higher, it becomes all the more important that the medical companies have a way to make back their investment.
R&D is not free. Even if the government paid for it, people would still have to bear the cost. Instead of people who actually require the medicine having to pay, the entire taxpaying population would pay. It's up to you to decide which is more fair. Of course, another big downside of government sponsored R&D is that it would be politicized. Imagine all the fun if our elected officials had/got to decide which diseases were the important ones. We'd probably spend all our money on Alzheimer's, as the baby boomers get older.
In short, Chris Rock is full of shit.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Woah there.. Hold on, professor.
Bacteriophages are viruses that attack bacteria. They infect the bacterial cell and use it to multiply. There are many different kinds of bacteriophages and they infect bacteria in different ways. A virus is a peice of RNA inside a coating. It is not alive, and it does not eat bacteria. Like any virus, it uses the host cell to reproduce more virus.
And it's also not 100% effective against bacteria. Like an antibiotic, some bacterial cells will mutate and become resistant to the virus. Considering how many billion times the cells divide, one mutation in a million can result in possible resistance traits.
Bacteriophage development is not that simple either. Its possible to isolate a bacteriophage, but since it does not reproduce without the aide of a host cell (which it will destroy), its kind of difficult to get it to multiply and hence mutate into a form thats more virulent.
Can't make any money out of it?!!?
Makes you think.
It makes me wonder why people would imply such simple solutions to a complex problem without understanding it first.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
This is true, and I am with you on it for the most part, but there are companies abusing this, and for that I feel it needs heavier regulation.
Companies like those who sell the essentially knock-off drugs to countries in Africa or Cuba vastly overpriced, meaning the people who need the drugs aren't getting the quality they should for the price they should. Even the organizations trying to help these people aren't getting anything good out of it.
There was a particularly good Mark Thomas Product on UK's channel 4 last year (He's essentially a comedian, but he does this show where he reveals scary things the governments are doing and tries to change them) where he was investigating this, and trying to get the government to change it's attitude to this. Of course no MP's were willing to comment...
Huh? If it's so "simple," then that implies cheap. If it's cheap, there's little R&D to recoup. If it's patentable (as you implied with your line about the Russians. I'm not sure why the USSR cared about American patents anyway, but I'll let that slide), one can make a profit, quickly recouping R&D costs.
Assuming the article you read wasn't just totally full of shit, there could be another reason why it's not profitable. There simply aren't that many antibiotic immune bacteria. Any new drug would almost certainly be orders of magnitude more expensive during the patent period than generic antibiotics, and there's very little that can't be cured with the right antibiotic at the right dosage. If antibiotic immune bacteria become more common, then people will pay a premium for bacteriophage based medicine, because there will be no alternative. Then it will become profitable.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Even before we really started to gain mastery over antibiotics, bacteriophages were studied quite extensively as a means for eradicating disease within in a patient. The problem? They simply don't work. Study after study has shown that sufficient numbers can't be delivered to the patient, and even when they are they don't have the anticipated the effect (ie bacteria don't die). You have to remember that the human body is hella complicated, and what will work on simple media won't necessarily work in vitro. I don't remember all the theories as to why it doesn't work, but I'm pretty sure the immune system is one of them--bacteriophages are non-self. The body can't differentiate between a "good" non-self and a "bad" non-self and will quickly destroy the viruses--if they even survive digestion. Yes, there is a camp that believe that treatment by bacteriophage works, but the scientific community as a whole has nixed the whole idea as there has yet to be conclusive proof that it does.
Mark Thomas page - Drug Dumping is the program I was commenting on.
Parent has a point. It might sound cruel not to distribute this new "wonder drug" but bacteria do gain resistance and sometimes they succeed in it surprisingly quickly. Antibiotics have been in wide spread use since the WW2 and in those 60 years whole families of bacteria have become resistent to some of the most common antibiotics. Currently doctors are scared that even vancomysin might be practically useless in a decade. What then? Very little effort was placed in the antibiotics research in the last 20 years. So there are only few good new drugs. Sure there are tons of antibiotics that work on bacteria like a charm but they also have this nasty feature of being toxic to humans in various degrees.
The drugs being developed now can take 20 years to reach the pharmacies. I can very well see the point in these people trying to make a profit. Profit in the next decade or two anyway. Even if you find the source of the chemical in the wild it isn't cheap refining the production process to scale into industrial proportions and testing and certifying drugs for humans is an enormous effort.
The abuse of antibiotics is horribly common. Doctors who prescribe "preventive" antibiotics to a common cold should be stripped of their licence to practice medicine. Patients should also be informed better of the importance of taking the dosage regularly and to finish the prescription.
MRSA is probably the best DNA and plasmid scavenger on the planet and in terms of resistance to medication it is probably on par with HIV in its ability to mutate to adapt and overcome the hostile environment.
I'd say it won't be too long before staph scavenges and adopts DNA material which makes this 'MRSA-killing bacteria' ineffective. Or, even worse, in the upcoming experiments, this medical firm will introduce plasmids and DNA to staph which aren't normally available in its environment. Perhaps, for example, the MRSA will adapt the plasmids corresponding to effective growth in water pools. Then we'll have staph that is spread through contaminated water supplies.
It gets worse. Our artificial tinkering of antibiotics has introduced a whole new rate of evolution into the microbiological world. We are fools if we don't take the big picture into account.
I suggest everyone here read Dr. Laurie Garrett's excellent book "The Coming Plague" for an in-depth history of our war on microbes, and why we are losing.
And yall fell for it. I'm sure plenty more people will fall for it too. This is definitely going to make trollback. I'm truly in awe at your craftsmanship Midget. It's nice to see you are out of your rutt and back in the game hitting homers again.
Triage is unavoidable. I base this conclusion on the observation that the universe itself seems to function with only limited supplies of matter and energy. Given this restriction, it is impossible to satisfy every want. In the broadest sense, there will never be enough resources (food, fuel, material, medicine).
You will die. The energy you would have consumed will be used to feed other forms of life. The materials that have been used in your construction will be disassembled and reused for other constructions. You are impermanent, and no part of the universe holds any obligation to extend your presence beyond the current moment. Get used to it. No ethical argument can countermand this fundamental operation of the universe. Limited resources, therefore limited courses of action.
Ethical arguments are appropriate, however, when deciding how to perform the triage. All arguments being made in this thread so far seem to support the opinion that our capitalist economy is unethical in how it doles out limited resources or rewards risky-but-successful investments in research.
Perhaps it would help to propose changes that would develop into a new, ethical system for performing this necessary triage, rather than arguing that triage itself is offensive. I repeat, triage is unavoidable.
I don't know of anyone using homebrew penicilin to cure their staph, you just waltz over to the doctor then pharmacy.
The problem isn't that the drug is well known, it is that people are stupid. They don't finish their dosage, and most people don't know that antibiotics have no effect on viruses. If we ever want to eliminate a bacteria, we'll have to come up with an effective drug that works in hours, or quarantine infected people by force until they are better.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
i thought patents were public. Anyone care to check for the patent? I wonder if having the text of the method of cultivation patent would reveal the secret bacteria?
E
...occuring naturally in rock pools
Is that like when you leap off a diving board into a graceful swan dive only to find, to your horror, that there's no water in the pool?
It makes me wonder why people would imply such simple solutions to a complex problem without understanding it first.
Precicely because I don't understand it. And I was mentioning a half remembered article.
Do you mind, your karma has just run over my dogma.
All those jerks that take penicillin for everything, then don't finish the whole round and save it for later and take it whenever, aren't going to have as long to become germ factories for resistant strains.
I hate those assholes. When we're taken down by some hyper-TB, I swear, don't ever mention to a guy with a gun that you ate antibiotics like aspirin before the plague.
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
Keep believing that. Keep believing that patents/copyrights and intellectual property protection in general, is necessary for people to continue to innovate.
That's what they want you to believe. They make more money that way.
A modern day witchhunt.
Quit your day job then pal and save the world.
I 've got a cardboard box in pretty good shape for your wife and kids to live in.
BTW, I wouldn't be planning any trips to Disneyworld soon.
Of course, it's not the public's fault if the facts are muddied. All too often, the media's brain-dead interpretation of "fairness" and "balance" consists of providing roughly equal time (or arguments of apparently roughly equal weight) even when that same outlet may already have thoroughly discredited a given argument. They are selling the appearance of fairness, after all. Actual fairness is as irrelevant as the *decrease* in aerodynamic performance caused by the rocket/jet fins and detailing of many cars in the 50/60's. Appearances are everything.
But to return to the pharmaceuticals companies: R+D is "a major expense" only after a tangled borderline perjurious accounting that was previously reserved for Ponzi schemes and the recording industry. Many of these ultra-expensive wonder drugs are sold for half as much in Canada, and a quarter the price or less in some parts of Europe, Asia or Africa. This wouldn't be the case if they were desperately trying to recoup genuine costs at their inflated US prices (because they'd be losing money on every non-US sale). They're just charging what the market will bear.
Further, as regards "innovation". Every week, I am bombarded by literally hundreds of ads (in medical journals, direct mailings an drug reps who barge in with no appointment, but are my sole source for "free samples" for my poor patients) for new wonderdrugs thhat are nothing more than 'me-too' knock-off. They move a hydroxyl group or a carbon atom on an existing drug, and run hundreds of tests (talk about expensive!) looking for some minute benefit over a current wonder drug (which they may also own). Almost invariably, the me-too is *less* effective or safe OVERALL than the existing drug (the lack of overall improvement is so consistent thatI sometimes think they're marketing the also-rans of the initial development effort - it would certainly be cheaper) Often the original 'wonder drug (progenitor of a new class) is itself only occassionally better than far cheaper and safer generic alternatives
Let me cite an example: in most cases, diuretics (drugs that cause you to urinate excess water) are both more effective and safer, at pennies a day, than Calcium Channel blockers and ACE (angiotensin convertine enzyme) inhibitors that cost several dollars a day -- for life! The study that proved this was one of the best and most unarguable in years, yet drug reps and execs will openly tell you that they aren't worried. "No one is pushing (marketing) cheap, safe diuretics which doctors have used for other purposes for centuries". Why do you think they market directly to patients? A few years ago, TVs and billboards were flooded with ads that didn't even specify what the drug was for, but urged "Ask your doctor". Perfectly healthy people came in, asking, afraid they were missing out on the Latest Greatest Thing.
Another example is the new anti-AIDS drug Fuzeon, widely hailed as an example of a drug whose high price ($20,570/yr = E19,000) is justified because it takes over 100 steps to prepare. Even if you accept their own figures justifying the cost, R+D was SFr 840 million ($620 million) and annual sales are projected to be $740 million per year, once hey hit full production (by which time, production costs are expected to be 10-15% of current levels)
Here are a couple of articles, for those who are still reading:
In U.S., marketing blurs into medicine
A more general analysis of the industry by the Markle Foundation (health care advocates)
Sorry for the rant.
The National Institute of Health produces many of the interesting drug candidates which the pharmas then develop and market. Vast amounts of taxpayer money are spent having the FDA review the results of the clinical trials the pharmas produce, to defend against the obvious profit motive. This defense is doomed to permanent inadequacy since there is more money available for the pharmas to cheat or game the system than for the FDA to defend against such cheating.
So replace the whole mess with a government department dedicated to new drug development, enjoined by its charter to make the new drugs freely available once they are developed. All pharmaceutical companies can become generics manufacturers, which is a reasonably (but not excessively) profitable business.
I know that everyone will reject this for ideological reasons, but consider that it solves every one of the problems you mentioned.
-Graham
Resistant isn't a verb, it's an adjective.
How the hell is hyphenation required there?
you guys have no idea, this guy tells the truth
Regarding the cost of extensive clinical trials many of you have mentioned, are they truly necessary in a case like this?
If I've contracted a deadly infection for which there is no treatment save agonizing death, I'll be happy to get on all fours and play guinea pig. Hell, I'd be delighted.
Long clinical trials for drugs that treat minor ailments make sense, but for fatal diseases with no other recourse, for fucks sake, someone cut the red tape.
Have a nice Staph-free day.
Over and inappropriate use of antibiotics is what's causing the problem.
Anybody that can figure out a way to tie chris rock to this story has GOT to get some mod points.
Those damn French!
is "cheaply" available antibiotics. Cheap in the sense of easy to overuse. And when you overuse antibiotics, guess what?
Ignorance speaking...
:-(
Vancomicyn and Teicoplanin are already effective agains MRSA. Their use is restricted by severe policies in almost all countries. Please inform yourself a little before posting
And once these costs are recouped, then what? How long does it take to make back that research money at $14.88 profit per pill? Let's see, oh yes I remember when that drug dropped from $15.00 per pill to $0.12 per pill... oh, no, wait THAT NEVER FUCKING HAPPENED.
... at, what, only 2 drugs manufactured, the company makes almost $11 Billion per year in profit, so going with say about $3 Billion invested on each major venture with 2 failures and one success that would still leave them with around $2 Billion leftover and another cash cow created that year? -- and that's just based on one year's income from two drugs consumed by 8% of the US population (250,000/281,421,906 [source US Census 2000]), that doesn't have anything to do with all the cash potentially leftover from previous years or other engineered pharmaceuticals.
2 pills twice per day for 30 days = $1785.60
x 1 year = $21,724.80
x 1000 people = $21,724,800.00
x 10 major metropolitan suburbs = $217,248,000.00
x 25 major metro US cities = $5,431,200,000
(or 8% of the US population in 2000)
So, 2 pills twice daily for a year for a thousand people per major metro city suburbs and outlying areas for 25 cities (assuming there is one major metro area + outlying areas that fit the scenario for every 2 states in the US alone) and we've got HOLY CRAP THAT'S A LOT OF MONEY IN JUST ONE YEAR AS A LOW ESTIMATE!
So, let's say
Yeah, maybe I'm missing something by not taking Generic drugs, other competition, kickbacks paid out to doctors for putting people onto more expensive meds that have more side effects than their old meds into account, but that isn't really necessary to prove my point. I also wasn't calculating in any measurement of that 8% that take more than 2 pills twice daily.
So, WTF am I paying for again? Look at the numbers (based on LOW estimates). How is it possible that we are still paying for the research in the 2nd or 3rd year of a drug's existence? That would mean, after 3 years, that AT LEAST $16.2 Billion went into researching that drug. $16.2 Billion of NEW research?
That's bullshit, and I don't care how you slice it.
1) brainwash the world into demanding "anti-bacterial" properties in every product
2) develop antibiotic resistent bacteria antibiotic
3) $$$
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
and taken out patents on how they can be cultivated and used.' Oh well."
well, since my comments are often regarded as inflammatory, i guess it's a good time to burn karma.
methinks this story is very inflammatory in character. "oh well" ?!? i'm not a fan of patents, but i do think that
in this way, all the slashfans already have their opinion formed and there is no way you can say something remotely positive about patents without being smothered in a pile of comments stating you are an idiot and you should open your eyes etc (yes i am exaggerating to make my point)
slashdot itself says it tries to promote proper discussion by its moderation system. let them give the right example then i'd say...
i know this is meta discussion and offtopic, but hey, i think the issue should be raised now and then.
so: this will be either
score -1 flamebait
or
score -1 offtopic
If you believe in creation, bacteria are amonst the first living forms of live upon which every other living being is based. This means one thing: they are very easy to adapt.
Simply using other bacteria to attack bacteria might work for awhile. If some of the Staph bacteria survive then they will change their DNA over several generations - which would be weeks or months - to resist this "attack". What then?
....and, correct me if I am wrong, but aren't there already reports of Vancomicyn resistant strains of MRSA? There are a variety of other reports besides that one.
Now we can overprescribe yet another antibiotic and thus churn out zillions of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
God, I *really* hope this is used only as a last ditch effort and is used correctly. It makes me ill when a doctor offers me an antibiotic for a viral infection.
I'm not even so sure it's something that's "broken" and in need of "fixing" in the first place.
It's quite questionable that it would be a good idea for any form of government to even attempt to fix/correct it.
I think often-times, we forget that "greed" isn't a trait only held by the "more privileged" among us. It's part of all of us. The only thing is, the most successful among us tend to get fingers pointed at them by the rest of us, because their greed is much more visibly on display.
Fact is though, most of the "have nots" would swap places with the "haves" in an instant, if given the chance. Of course, as soon as they did, they'd become the very thing they claimed to despise up until that point.
Instead of being so worried that "the rich keep getting richer", it would be more productive to ask how they got their initial riches to begin with, and make more of an effort to follow in those footsteps - if wealth is of much concern to an individual.
It's not like the rich sucked up all the money from circulation, and there's simply no way to earn a dollar anymore!
right from your own home, earn >$1000000000
in your first 35 years or LESS.
thousands of scientists and drug companies have made FORTUNES looking in obscure places for LIFE SUSTAINING pharmocueticals.
Just start looking at nasty dirty places in and around your home and use RIDICULOSLY EXPENSIVE LAB EQUIPMENT to search for CURATIVE properties.
It's so easy anyone can do it
or not
For every billion dollar cure patents produce, there are litterly thousands of cheaper and safer possibbilities passed by because they can not be patented. This story is a classic example - in a non patent world this discovery would quickly be spread all over the planet. Even worse are the issues with the AIDS drugs, where African countries were litterally sued to prevent the manufacture of generics. This patent philosophy literally reaks with ignorance, it is based of an assumption that one company with a patent monopoly would do more than the tens of millions of smaller groups arround the world with the same knowledge - bullshit. Before shoving this monopoly down everyones throat, how about taking a real burdon of proof, that does more than wine about incentive and point to the success of economies whose free market nature would have made them successfull anyhow.
I really don't care about the costs of development for the industry, every industry has cost development issues, even fast food joints. Maybe Ford wouldn't invest in auto safety without a monopoly on making cars - so what? That's their problem, not everyone elses.
It's just stupid to think that it is fair to allow an artificial monopoly on important discoveries because it is an incentive to develop more.
Which would you rather have?
1) A cure for AIDS (or drug-resistant staph, or whatever fatal nastiness) that costs $500,000, and a lot of aids patients cured.
2) No cure for AIDS (or drug-resistant staph, or whatever fatal nastiness), and all of those patients dead.
You only get one. Because it costs many millions of dollars to hunt up a cure for anything. And once it's found, another $13 million (and rising) to get it approved by a bureaucracy that gets dinged big-time for approving a drug that harms a few people through side-effects but not for withholding one that would save 100,000 lives a year (example: Beta blockers for preventing second-and-fatal heart attacks.)
The bright side is that they're going to try to get as much money as possible from their drug once they have it. So they won't price it so high that only five patients can afford it. Fast nickles are better than slow dimes - so (as soon as a few rich ones have been soaked to get it early), they'll drop the price and sell it to a few thousand well-to-do, then again to get the insurance companies to declare it no longer experimental, then again to sell as much as they can to the people without insurance. And they'll sell 'em cheaper in poor countries (as soon as they've sold some to any rich rulers that need curing.) Meanwhile they'll donate some to charity clinics for a tax deduction based on the high price, and hand out physician samples (to physicians who will save 'em for the people who can't afford 'em because there aren't enough samples to cure everybody). (And there's a rare-disease special approval for drugs that don't have enough market to pay for the bureacuracy's regular approval process.)
And that makes sense even to compensated psychopaths in the executive suite. But I'll tell you a dirty little secret: Not ALL the decision-makers in drug companies are money-grubbing psychopaths. Some of 'em are there because they really want to help people. But (unlike some bleeding-hearts) they're smart enough to know that, after researching ten thousand compounds to get a cure (or "treatment" - make it better without ending it, if that's all you can manage) for ONE disease, you need to make enough money to pay off the cost, and the investors, to have enough left over (or enough profit to attract more from investors) to find cures or treatments for the next two, or ten, or fifty diseases.
Most of these patents are for these which nature has spent millions of years perfecting. The first person who comes along and notices it does not deserve an artificial monopoly on a natural drug.
This system was perfected back when the way to find a new antibiotic was to hunt up plants and molds, extract their funny compounds, identify any that did something useful, figure out how to make it in bulk, and productize it. (Think "penicillin" and "{whatever}mycin".) That's exactly the financial case above, and exacty what we're talking about with this new compound. They DAMNED WELL deserve a return for the millions they spent finding this - and the other millions they spent going down blind alleys while hunting for it.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
As a long-time employee in a pharma giant, near but not in the top level science, I know first hand the culture and their attitude; it is elitist and (was) very top-heavy with it's highly paid Wharton" business school managers who accounted for nothing but paperclips.
"we do nothing anything inexpensively; we are not a University" I was warned; the more expensive and shiny the better. I hated the culture and left it, the Republican-ish stewardship and snobbery; even the locals hate you if they know you are part of "that company".
As in other *required* areas of our life/lifestyle, the government(s) will be forced to take over or regulate this burden; society cannot afford to fund hyper-educated, top heavy, and expensive endeavors ala space shuttle, orphaned drugs, our highway system, etc.
...bullshit. I understand that people deserve to be compensated for their time and efforts even in the field of medical R&D, but this is ridiculous. Something with such widesweeping implications and of such potential benefit to humanity should not be patented. Fortunately, I contend that the concept of patenting something that occurs naturally is stupid on it's face. It doesn't matter how they patent it. Once the information has been disclosed it will find it's way to freedom.
But that is essentially irrelevant.
We need to control, limit, restrict, and otherwise prevent the massive abuse of these life saving techniques.
Patents are a good start to make sure that idiots do not use anti-biotics to insure their lawn is healthy during a drought.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
There were a lot of interesting threads above arguing the right or lack of a right of a drug company to hold patent secrets and the attendent ability to set prices.
This rapidly becomes a matter of taste in morals and what a society should allow or does allow in terms of ethics.
The way pharmaceutical companies operate in many cases, is analogous to blackmail: a man walks up to a woman whose husband has a violent temper. He tells her that he has put them in a place where her husband is bound to find them very soon unless he gives her all the money she can beg, borrow or steal.
Like someone with a fatal illness, the woman has very little time to respond and has to put many of her resources into providing for her tormentor's profit.
One man is a filthy criminal. The other is a corporate hero.
It is interesting to note that when there is a sufficient pressure of national interest, governments lesson or remove the power of companies and individuals to derive profit from their inventions (see the conflict between the Wright Brothers and the Inventor Curtis over the aileron at the start of the first World War).
The key question which is only resolved by the political will of the people in control is: 'at what point do the interests of the many (alleviation of suffering, survival ), outweigh the interests of corporations and entrepreneurs?'
It's an ugly question. Not everyone has the stomach to intellectualize people dying of infection by a resistant strain so they can charge $100 for antibiotics instead of $10 but this is what drug companies are all about.
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
"Yeah. It smells, too..."
Hey, I found a one-click shopping button at the beach. Can I patent it?
Table-ized A.I.
well, when resistent strains emerge, you isolate them, contain them, do not allow them to reproduce and spread.
Kinda sucks for the individual hosts, but good for humanity as a whole, dontcha think?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
There's nothing inherently unreasonable about them keeping their discovery secret, but patents? The bacterium is a discovery, not an invention. And the process of "cultivate bacteria to get useful byproduct which is then used to treat infection" is not novel; changing the identity of the bacterium doesn't make it so. Neither are various ways of cultivating bacteria, unless there's something really special about this one. Besides, you aren't supposed to be able to both patent something and keep it a secret.
cheaply made != cheaply found
If you can do it cheaper than these guys, start a pharmaceutical. Shutup or do, don't just bitch.
"And, to claim that one of the "legitimate rights of others" is for free/cheap/easy access to this product is to annihilate the concept of rights per se."
We dont believe in rights to thoughts and ideas. That concept is a clear compromise with no real rights or wrongs, to deny that is to deny reason itself.
Antibiotic Resistant Staph Antibiotic Resistant Staph Discovered!
And so it begins.
Where does the staph come from? Why is it resistant? Is that natural, or because of human use of antibiotics, or perhaps run-off from farms?
Let's see, that antibiotic (or at least the raw form) has probably been in those rocks for hundreds, if not thousands or millions of years. If it was easy to find and required no effort to find it, test it (how long did it take to do so?), and manufacture it, someone already would have done so. Someone had to spend money and time to discover it. Why is it wrong for them to get paid for their effort? If they hadn't looked it could be 50 years before it had even been found, would that have been better?
No one will sponsor efforts like this (or laying cable or fiber for that matter) if they aren't going to get a return on their money. Likewise no one (well few people) is going to perform the work without getting paid for their effort.
From what I could understand bacteriophage development is so simple, it would be impossible to make any money out of it.
BooHaHa. You can make money off of anything if you play it right. See 80's Hair Bands.
If you aren't part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
Consider how important it is to keep antibiotics in reserve. Previously, Cipro was the last line of defense - and it was used up during the anthrax scare. There's plenty of Cipro to go around, but the usefulness has dropped significantly since the appearance of bacteria resistant to Cipro have appeared.
For those of you who don't remember biology, bacteria resistance is particularly nasty because unrelated kinds of bacteria can actually swap genes for traits (including resistance.) Thus, you could take an incomplete course of antibiotics, and end up with drug-resistant e-coli in your gut (which are harmless.) Then, you catch a nastier infection (say, a bacterial pneumonia), the nasty bacterium manages to swap genes with your drug-resistant e-coli, and WHAM, you've got a deadly infection that is resistant to all available drugs. Hospitals are particularly deadly because they tend to treat the sickest patients with the most advanced drugs... and as a result many drug resistant strains LIVE IN HOSPITALS! (Yes, this is a true fact - disinfection is a serious bitch with certain strains of bacteria...)
The longer they keep this new stuff away from the general public, the better it will be in the event we REALLY need it.
Sure, the pharmaceuticals have to make money, but they're not lily-white, either.
It's sad that profit taking influences the availability of medicine. That's an effect of having the pharmaceutical industry as a purely capitalist venture.
Clinical trials, advertising, marketing, pseudo-shortages, all get leveraged by the pharmaceutical industry to get more profits, even when the quality and availability of the product suffers for it. IMHO, the excuse "Hey, we have to make money," does not go far enough to cover the improprieties perpetrated by the pharmaceutical companies.
We (I'm in the U.S.) have police and military that are not encumbered by profit-taking. They defend us against human threats. I'd like to see the day that we have similarly motivated defence against biological threats as well.
1. Bacterial Infection becomes resistant to antibiotics
2. New antibiotic found that kills resistant strain
3. profit!^H^H^H^H^H^H^H New strain mutates that's resistant to new antibiotic.
maybe its a good thing they're keeping a tight lid on this, i'd hate to lose a finger next time i got a staph infection
...Some monkeys with typewriters, and lots-o-time.
Or Tesla and Edison.
Or Mozart and Soliari.
Or Buddy Holly and Milli Vanilli.
Or John F. Kennedy and Dan Quayle.
-nt-
There's a basic problem with "dreaming up alternatives to the current system". Most of "the current system" is based on freedom.
There's always a crowd that wants to come up with alternatives that they're SURE will work better.
They usually start with "if we just put these people in prison for doing things the way they want instead of the way we tell them, then there'll be XYZ benefit". Sometimes, they say "if we just steal XYZ from this group, we can use it for ABC purpose".
So regardless of the problems with the current system, people who don't want their stuff stolen and don't want to be threatened with prison tend to be wary of the new guy with the new idea for socio-economic construction.
Here's a freedom-enhanced idea for everyone to get the new antibiotic for however cheap you can imagine: buy all the shares of the company at the market price and then give the drug away once you own it.
See how everyone got the antibiotic they needed and no one's freedom was curtailed?
Another problem with private development of drugs is that market forces cause the development of the wrong kinds of drugs: you get dozens of redundant designer anti-allergy drugs, but less common diseases don't get addressed.
Research is something the government has demonstrated they are good and efficient at. And, in fact, a lot of private drug research is still partially supported by the government anyway.
" AquaPharm Bio-Discovery Limited, the story notes 'is keeping the identity of its MRSA-killing bacteria a closely guarded secret, and taken out patents on how they can be cultivated and used.' Oh well."
So they aren't taking out patents on the bacteria but just the way that it can be cultivated?
That sounds reasonable I wouldn't think that something that was created by Mother Nature could be patented but as far as "the way that it can be cultivated" that's no secret.
It's easy to cultivate bacteria. If you don't believe me just look in my refrigerator! Hell, just give me a couple of the little critters and we'll have a surplus in no time!
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
If we gave it out like candy, then we'd soon find a new super-resistant form of staph.
A lot of the problems we are having with various bacteria have been caused by over-use of anti-biotics in the first place.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The germs are gonna win!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Biology is modern feudalism. It's already impossibly tedious and slow to make any progress in biological research yet these wives and daughters do the research for free. They work endlessly with radioactive phosphorus, carcinogenic gel, in green fluorescent lighting for free for many years before maybe starting $5.25 an hour as a paid research assistant. If the drug companies are charging any money for their research, it's probably for the many years and decades each tiniest advance takes.
Take out a 2nd mortgage on the doublewide to pay for it! Come one now...
Actually, I know several people with really nasty staph, at least one of which has been on antibiotics for more than a year, so it's pretty safe to say that it's resistant. Not to say this shouldn't make this company a lot of money, I think they deserve it if they can make this work. This is a HUGE relief, let me tell you, if you've ever had a severe dermonecrotic staph infection, it's incredibly nasty.
I happen to have one now, and I just spent three hours this morning gouging out my wounds with a razor blade. I think the standard antibiotics are going to work for me, thank God, but if they don't, it's sure nice to know that something better is in the works. Staph is a nightmare.
My site: Free Nature Pictures
I'm a physician. I just received in the mail today from the state health dept a folder with advice to providers and materials for educating people about antibiotic resistance. It includes brochures for the waiting rooms, a "prescription" pad that states "You have been diagnosed...virus...antibiotic treatment does not help viral infections.", and several other related things. http://www.healthoregon.org/antibiotics
Ah yes, diuretics. safe to everything except your pants. I do have a laptop and wireless, but I'm not too keen on using my toilet as an office chair. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this the drug that old folks hate to take cause they have to stay close to the toilet for a hour or so...
Yeah, sure, go on keeping secrets.
Go on till you can be called truly 'sick bastards',
go on till you die thanks to the fact you just didn't happen to know.
Years ago in England, several problems were solved by offering to pay a "King's Ransom" to solve the problem. One of the problems was finding where you were on the globe (Londgitude) using a clock.
I'm wondering what would happen if the US goverment said "We will give 1 billion US$ to the person that either 1) devlops a cure for Cancer 2) a cure for Aids 3) some other issue"
It could get very interesting if the money was given to the person solving the proble directly.
There's a basic problem with "dreaming up alternatives to the current system". Most of "the current system" is based on freedom.
"Freedom" is merely a word, just another flexible manufacture, defined by manufactured context. It has previously abetted vast pain, and the snakeoil salesmen have the cure. The word is redefinable by those owning the most prolific word and context manufacturing systems. For every truth you can painstakingly extract, there will be countless lies, all manufactured nearly effortlessly.
In the US & Canada, we're pretty careful about how we prescribe our antibiotics these days.
We've gotten better about empirical treatments, we know that "less is more" in most cases (we won't use a howitzer like vancomycin when a lesser drug will do, for example), and we've gotten careful about when we give them out at all (as opposed to the past, when any old sign of infection would get a dose of antibiotics).
We also know when to bring out the big guns, too (and how to keep them effective longer by completing the regimen).
I'd say that from what I've seen, most common antibiotic resistance (like, to penicillin) is a hold-over from the days of free-dispensing the drugs, from overprescription and poor patient-compliance overseas (some places more than others), and from livestock.
Really bad nasties, like MRSA or VRE (vancomycin-resistant enterococci) are more from hospitals and clinics, where there's an overabundance of ill folks, immunocompromised patients everywhere, tons of different drugs being used, and constant attempts at cleaning/disinfection.
People know when they're doing what they want vs. doing what they're forced to do. Redefining words doesn't change that.
"The employer of the scientists, AquaPharm Bio-Discovery Limited, the story notes 'is keeping the identity of its MRSA-killing bacteria a closely guarded secret, and taken out patents on how they can be cultivated and used.'"
Without the employer of the scientists, there would be no antibiotic, since these scientists need a paycheck. Without the ability to patent drugs there would be no employer since there would be no incentive to spend money developing drugs. Therefore, without patents, there would be no anitbiotic for staph infections. QED.
Vote for Pedro
Good explanation of how the research and clinicals imbue a higher cost to drugs.
I'll add, though, that the USA & other prosperous nations often carry an additional burden: subsidizing the discounting in less prosperous locales. Simply put, drug companies recover the cost of lower prices in poorer or regulated countries by transfering the higher costs elsewhere.
That said, at least I can afford the drugs my family needs. I really feel for the folks in Africa & SouthEast Asia who must choose between starving themselves or watching their kids die of dysentary...
Perhaps some open-source software for chemical analysis would help -- what's worth a PayPal donation right now?
Zappy5000
You didn't acknowledge that there's a shift in expectations from generation to generation. Freedom meant something much different 100 years ago. Media and government grow in influence all the while.
If computer programming were like drug discovery, then we could spend our days throwing different objects at our keyboards until an e-commerce engine popped out.
These opinions guaranteed or your money back.
It's sort of like taking your share of responsibility for things you didn't understand, for picking A, B, C, or D when there's no "none of the above", for answering the phone, for the law of unintended consequences, for those who only pretended they didn't really understand, for missing the small print, for believing the nice news reporter, for believing the get-rich-quick scheme, for being so easily scared, for taking the easiest way out of an unbearable situation, for accepting the free sample, for not reading the label, for not doing adequate research before investing, ad. nauseum.
"Morality" is such a subjective thing, IMHO. According to my personal "morality", it is in fact immoral to refuse treatment to the ill; similarly it is "immoral" for a corporation to set the price of a needed drug out of reach to those who need it.
So, to answer your first question: it is not immoral for an individual (or a corporation) to request money for a product; but it is immoral for that individual to deny medication to the sick. (How many of us act "morally" on a daily basis, I leave as an exercise in sorrow to the reader.)
The second and third paragraphs of your post seem to be trolls, and I will not attempt to address them here.
Drugs in Canada are price controlled. The drug companies aren't selling for less in Canada because they want to, they sell for less because they have to.
In 1991 prescription drugs cost 34% more in the US than Canada. Canadian law regulates the price of new drugs and price increases of existing drugs. Also, provincial health ministries subsidize pharmaceuticals.
If they patent it, they have to disclose the invention (make it public knowledge). I think that would have to include this secret .
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html
What about just using maggots, instead?
Epaminondas
"Uncle Cosmo ... why do they call this a word processor?" ... you've seen what food processors do to food,
"It's simple, Skyler
right?"
-- MacNelley, "Shoe"
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