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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.
Google doesn't index user sigs, so stop trying to "Google Bomb" with them.
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.
Unfortunately, our medicare system is in a bit of a mess right now. Sorting out things like waiting lists for MRIs and non-elective surgery are big priorities.
Money for pure research projects up here is few and far between (although I'm not saying it's non-existent -- research at hospitals like Sick Kids in Toronto is excellent).
But, agreed...it'd sure be nice if someone took up the gauntlet and pursued a cure for Type 1 diabetes.
-psy
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.
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.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
TheLink wrote "Read the article again till the end."
/. If this is a useful new application of BCG there is no rule nowadays that stops a patent for the new use.
I suggest reading the literature on the subject as well. It is well known that immune destruction starts off IDDM, but there is no evidence -- including regard to what is reported in the article -- that immune suppression revives beta-cells in patients who have none left. I.e. the large majority of humans with IDDM have long since lost all their beta cells to the destructive process that has run its course, and there is no bringing those cells back from the dead.
And I stick to what I said about the big bad pharma angle being mixed up too. If a drug or combination of drugs has a surprising new effect then patent protection is likely to be available on the usual conditions no matter how much noise to the contrary is made on
-wb-