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Trials for Type 1 Diabetes Cure
An anonymous reader writes "According to this New York Times article, the pharmaceutical companies and NIH are shunning research for a cure for Type 1 diabetes. There's no money in a cure using medicine with an expired patent. Dr Faustman (researcher/professor at Harvard Medical School) has cured type 1 diabetes in mice and has been approved for Phase 1 clinical trials in humans. The only problem is raising the money, which Lee Iacocca is helping with."
The NYT must be cracking down; the first dozen logins from bugmenot.com didn't work for me.
No problem, I found a copy of the NYT article on Lee Iacocca's page. (Hopefully the server holds up.) Enjoy.
I will be calling Dr Faustman's office tommorow for more information and a follow up appointment. Even if it means taking a trip to Harvard from Canada. My pet mouse needs the cure desparately.
I've been following Dr Faustman's research since I learned of it a couple years ago, and I have a lot of hope that it will work. However, I've also been aware of the fact that if a cure is found, or a cheaper alternative treatment, there will be many obstacles to getting it to us.
Type 1 diabetics are in the minority, but we're still pretty big cash cows for certain companies. Besides the various types of insulin we need to survive, most diabetics that wish to succesfully manage the disease use additional products like disposeable needles, blood glucose meters and strips (big money), insulin pumps, and more. Potentially, it's many thousands of dollars per person per year and not many companies would want to lose that cashflow.
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Without a patent, drug companies face competition from those who put no money into research, trials, and FDA approval. Whoever pays for the drug research would incur severe losses. We'd depend almost entirely on government funding, academic research, chance, and philanthropy to develop new drugs.
When it becomes uneconomical to develop a promising drug, usually because it treats too rare of a disease, but sometimes due to other reasons, we call those orphan drugs. Sometimes the government intervenes and finishes the research. Maybe it'll happen this time.
I can understand how this could happen in the US. My question is: Why doesn't she go to Canada or somewhere else where the health care system is publicly funded. Is such countries the economic factors greatly favor a cure, rather then ongoing treatments.
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As an Immunologist - I can't even begin to count the number of times we've cured RA (EAE), GvHD, various forms of cancer, etc. in mice, only to have the 'cure' fail, or even make the disease worse, in patients.
Companies are in business to make money. It would be irresponsible for someone at a pharmaceutical company to spend money developing something they couldn't make any money on.
The medical community isn't working in our best interest alone. Scientists work in areas where the best interest of the individual overlaps with the best interest of their employer. There are times when the best interest of the individual does not match up with the best interest of any company and these areas of medicine are horribly neglected (see blueberries vs Lipitor, oxygen therapy vs blood pressure medication, low carb vs the AHA Diet, First Do No Harm). I'm not saying that the doctors are wrong on all these things, I'm saying nobody is putting in the work to check up on them because there's nobody to pay for it.
If the only medical research that gets done is privately funded then the only medical advancements that get made will increase the income of medical companies. If that's the case, the cost of medical care can only go up (unless someone is taking someone else's business but that rarely happens)
I don't think this study is alone. Someone needs to fund this stuff or we'll all be taking out second mortgages because the medical community has convinced us we have to or we'll die.
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Yeah but them drug companies are standing on research that was funded by the govt and carried out at public universities. Cox2 enzyme is a prime example of a billion dollar industry handed from a university to the drug companies for free. Not all of those billions the drug companies claim to be spending are actually coming out of their own pockets. They may be finishing the research privately but you can bet you and I paid for the startup costs.
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The article is mixed up. Nobody is shunning islet-cell transplantation for (IDDM) diabetes. Many people in the field believe that the currently most promising procedure is one developed by surgeon James Shapiro in Canada. It is in human patient trials in more than one country already now. A drawback of course (a big one for some who would otherwise be potential patients) is the need for immunosuppressant therapy after the surgical procedure.
The 'big bad pharmaceutical co' angle is mixed up too. This is a surgical procedure. There is no new pharmaceutical at the centre of it. But if new combinations of immunosuppressants prove specially well adapted to patients who have this procedure, that would quite likely be a new combination of features, and patent protection would likely be available for whatever it turns out to be, anyway.
-wb-
Read the article again till the end.
They found that the treatment/drugs supposed to prepare the mice for transplant actually _cured_ the mice. The treatment was supposed to stop the immune system from blowing away the transplanted islet cells. But after the treatment the islet cells _regrew_ back. So there was no need for a transplant.
""No one had cured them," he said. "Here was this treatment that we thought would get them ready for a transplant but - eureka! - the diabetes was cured.""
Government research has this crazy idea that companies won't want something unless they can get an exclusive license to it. So they'll halfway develop something, then start looking for companies, then sign licensing deals with the companies. This is the big problem - if the government develops something, than anybody ought to be able to implement it. If nobody has the balls to perfect the product and bring it to market, then that's their problem.
Why? This statement is 100% false. For many diseases and disorders there is more than one method of treatment. For cancer, there is chemotherapy and radioation. Both work. Same thing for diabetes, if one method works, why not another?
Stem cell research can result in a cure for diabetes. The same thing can be true for Dr. Denise Faustman's treatment.
I'd have to say NYT either is biased against stem cell research or they just repeat another's bias.
I'm wondering who moderated you as "Insightful" when your comment proves nothing. Vioxx and Phen-Fen held promise of a huge return on investment during the period they were under development. Those two turned out to fail but a certain percentage of lucrative drugs are expected to fail. This puts them in a different class than drugs which from the very start can be ruled out as showing little promise of a return on investment at all- even though they may be needed to maintain public health.
There is a reason we have Viagra, Cialis, Levitra, and no flu vaccine.
I would like to suggest that this opinion of drug companies is, in some ways too generous; Its not their fault, its the economics and laws which we set up to drive pharmaceutical research and profits.
Similar outcomes different goals?: Illegal Drug dealers induce a dependency by pushing a prohibited substance, targeting any easy mark. Drug companies discover dependecies by hiring "researchers" to find substances which alleviate or "manage" pre-existing common diseases, targeting any sick person.
These "no-cure" drugs temporarily alleviate the symptoms of the diseases, and even extend the patients life (and thus profits), while, "unfortunately", rarely managing to fundamentally cure anything. When was a drug as useful as penicillin last discovered?
The really clever people are in marketing, its carefully created to spin the appearance of dedicated people attempting to find cures. I find that laughably naive, clearly the economic pressure precludes that from happening. However, I suspect many of the scientists and 'caring professionals' in the field prefer to believe that comfortable fallacy and self image.
To me this focus on researching pushable drugs, versus practical cures, is a natural outcome of allowing the humanitarian medical sciences to be solely driven by raw capitalism and simple greed.
The pharmaceutical companies, will grow wealthier, and the poignant marketing campaigns, and "real soon now cures", will be glossy, slick and convincing, for as long as the hypocrisy continues.
Note: Where there are funds for any cure oriented research, it will typically be in areas where there is a huge PR payback in company image and good will factors.
We, the public, are the addicts, we pay the taxes, fund the basic research, and then have to drink their coolaid and swallow the bitter and expensive pills, just so we can feel better... for a while.
IMHO, there is no cure for this chronic disease of legalized "no-cure" drug pushing, except by radical surgery on the NIH and our health research laws.
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