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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."
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.
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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."
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...
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
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.
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.
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
"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."
If it is wrong to patent materials obtained in this manner there is an easy solution. Why don't you go beachcombing for the cure to the next big disease and release the rights to the world at large.
Oh wait, you don't have millions of dollars to blow scouring the world for pools of slime that probably don't contain anything, but which might contain the cure for AIDS? Neither do these guys - hence the patent...
If the person who discovered penicillin patented it, where would medicine be today?
Just where we are now - patents only last about 10 years after the product is developed enough to relase...
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 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?
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.
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.
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 $740 million per year, once hey hit full production (by which time, production costs are expected to be 10-15% of current levels)
Here are a couple of articles, for those who are still reading:
In U.S., marketing blurs into medicine
A more general analysis of the industry by the Markle Foundation (health care advocates)
Sorry for the rant.
Oddly enough, I think the big problem here is not the drug company, it's the doctors. Antibiotic resistance is their fault. Go to any small-town non-prestegious hospital and you'll see doctors prescribing multiple high-power antibiotics for non-critical applications. These anti-biotics are powerful _because_ they are rare - by overusing them rather then getting the last use out of the simpler antibiotics, they doom the world to diseases resistant to even the strongest antibiotics.
Larger, more prestigious hospitals have to keep in much closer touch with research (often being research-oriented themselves) and tend to be more aware of the problems of antibiotic abuse.
Complex, rare antibiotics like this should not be needed - at least not yet.
Bull$hit, I say!
If you'd do your research, as opposed to the kneejerk disgust with doctors many Americans have developed, the predominant cause of antibiotic resistance is: LIVESTOCK!
WHAT?!?
Yes, A MAJOR cause of antibiotic resistance is the highly common practice of farmers mixing antibiotics with their feed. A steady dose of antibiotics helps the animals spare some energy for getting fat and happy, instead of fighting off common infections, which means more meat for the farmers to sell. A hell of a lot more antibiotics get used by dairy cattle than by snot-nosed five-year-olds, exposing a lot more bugs to antibiotics than they ever could. As a mater of fact, vancomycin, one of the last, great "superantibiotics," capable of taking out MRSA, (sometimes called a "flesh-eating" bacteria) is gonna be undermined soon, because one of the "feed supplements" being used is very similar in structure and function to Vanco.
Many doctors are trying hard to conserve the "big gun" antibiotics, which are HELLA expensive, for when they're actually needed, but that's occuring more and more. Plus, the fact that patients often demand an antibiotic when they've got a cold (which is a virus, and doesn't get TOUCHED by even the best antibiotic), and you've got a tragedy in the making.
Not flaming, not trolling, just one Medical Student's experience.