Cancer Drug May Not Get A Chance Due to Lack of Patent

theshowmecanuck writes to mention that in a recent study, researchers at the University of Alberta Department of Medicine have shown that an existing small, relatively non-toxic molecule, dichloroacetate (DCA), causes regression in several different cancers. From the article: "But there's a catch: the drug isn't patented, and pharmaceutical companies may not be interested in funding further research if the treatment won't make them a profit. In findings that 'astounded' the researchers, the molecule known as DCA was shown to shrink lung, breast and brain tumors in both animal and human tissue experiments."

Comments

Am I missing something?

[Anonymous Coward]

If this *REALLY* works, wouldn't people be willing to pay for it?

If people are willing to pay for it, how come somebody isn't willing to profit from it?

Re:Am I missing something?

[Anonymous Coward]

If this really works, anyone who goes through the effort needed to conduct FDA trials and bring the drug to market will immediately face competition from generic drug makers who've invested very little in bringing their product to market. If it were patented, then it would become profitable to spend the money to show that it really does work. Otherwise, the company doing the leg work won't have the leg up on their competition.

Re:Am I missing something?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re:Am I missing something?

Yes.

It's not that people wouldn't pay; it's that without a patent, there's no protection for the manufacturer. Company A pays for the R&D on the drug, and then they go through years of clinical trials to clear the regulatory agencies. This costs $100mm to $1bln for most drugs. If there's no patent protection, Companies B through H can produce generic equivalents, prove equivalency to the regulators (at a cost of a few 10s of millions), and then undercut company A on price.

In the short run this appears to benefit the consumer. In reality however, Company A is too smart to give a free ride to their competitors. The drug never gets developed and more people die.

Re:Am I missing something?

[bfields]

If this *REALLY* works, wouldn't people be willing to pay for it? If people are willing to pay for it, how come somebody isn't willing to profit from it?

We don't *know* for sure yet that it really works. We don't know for sure that it may not have some bizarre side-effect in some patients. Answering those questions to the degree of certainty that will convince the FDA to let any US doctor start prescribing it to patients will take huge amounts of time and money. And once one company has expended that effort, *anyone* can sell the drug--and all the companies that didn't fund the testing will have the advantage that they don't need to set a price that will recoup the investment in testing.

So the market will penalize the company that actually does most of the work needed to bring the product to market. As a result, no company will do that work.

That's the problem that patents on pharmaceuticals are intended to fix, really: they fund the testing required to establish to the government's satisfaction that the drug is safe and effective, by giving a temporary monopoly to a single company, as an incentive for that company to invest in the testing.

We think of patents as existing to reward that "ah-ha" moment of insight that produces an original idea. But often such insights are cheap, and occur to multiple people simultaneously. What we really need the patent monopoly for is to encourage the research required to bring a product to market, whenever that research is something that, once done, any competitor could use for free.

Re:Am I missing something?

[erroneus]

So yeah, there's no financial incentive. So what about in other countries? Will it get developed and tested elsewhere? And if successfully tested, will it become legal in the U.S.?

What we're talking about is the essential blocking of just one path by which a drug gets to patients. Is there only one path? And if there's only one path, *THEN* we have a serious problem where the industry is truly getting in the way of a better existance for humanity.

Re:Am I missing something?

[cayenne8]

"That's the problem that patents on pharmaceuticals are intended to fix, really: they fund the testing required to establish to the government's satisfaction that the drug is safe and effective, by giving a temporary monopoly to a single company, as an incentive for that company to invest in the testing. "

Well, if this is the case, why can a US institute like NIH, which I think gets a bit of govt. research funding, conduct the trials for drugs that are not patentable, but, might be of benefit to humans...and if it passes...then all drug companies are free to manufacture them?

If this couldn't be done, then possibly the govt. needs to set up a system for testing drugs that the drug companies won't/can't push through due to the cost with no patent protections.

Re:Am I missing something?

[cecille]

While clinical trial are expensive, there is really no reason that they have to be funded by big companies. Typically they are, of course, because they want the patent rights to drug discoveries and are willing to put up the cash. But barring that, I dont see any reason why government research funding would not cover these types of discoveries if the funding application was made. Tonnes of way more dubious research is funded at high levels.

Re:Am I missing something?

[vandan]

The people are willing, but our governments are not.

I have long argued that the drug companies should be sidelined in favour of public money ( and lots of it ) being invested into medical research, with the benefits enjoyed by all. The problem is that the pharmecutical industry is incredibly powerful ( and rich ), and prevent our governments from performing any public research, insisting that the 'market will provide'. This story points out the bullshit level in this case. The market does not provide anything for society other than those things which make the most profits for market players. If we want the best possible medical technology, and for it to be accessible by all people and not just those with the cash, then we need to have massive public investment, and also consider specifically excluding medical technology from patent law.

Re:Am I missing something?

[stormcoder]

Actually, if you read the article (I know bizarre), you would have know that it is already and FDA approved drug and is actively prescribed. It has some side effects but nothing horrible. Since it is already approved, getting it cleared for use in a an additional capacity is much easier since it has been proven safe for human use. The only thing that needs to be proved is effecacy.

Re:Am I missing something?

[HiThere]

Actually, you are overstating the work which the drug companies engage in. Most of the research is done in academia, under federal funding. But not quite enough to quality a drug for FDA approval. Then some drug company buys the rights to something that it considers promissing, after most of the risk is gone. It then runs the final trials, etc., and gets the patents.

Is it any wonder that the drug companies have such remarkable profits.

Personally I feel that the solution here is to forbid exclusive or discriminatory licensing of research developed with federal money. This would probably mean that research trials would need to be carried further (i.e., more up front investment), but it would prevent the monopoly pricing that is currently the rule. (If you don't think my scenario is common, then what I'm proposing wouldn't very often change anything.)

Re:Am I missing something?

[MrNaz]

I don't have mod points, so consider this my +1 insightful. I agree with your position, healthcare should be a public institution, a proper public institution with all aspects controlled by the public sector, not just a few delapidated hospitals providing a perfunctory sub-par service and the really important stuff controlled by profit seeking corporations.

Re:Am I missing something?

[dbrutus]

Since DCA is already on the market for the aforementioned mitochondrial dysfunction maladies, there doesn't need to be any testing. You just administer it "off label", if you dare. The problem is purely a legal one, figuring out the liability if you get the dosage wrong. The people who are currently making DCA have little incentive to fund that sort of thing because they're making next to no money on it already.

This is a job for a different business model, that's all.

Re:Am I missing something?

[dbrutus]

Proving efficacy is only a necessity in a minority of countries, the big one being the US. Proving safety is usually sufficient elsewhere which is why medicines often get approved quicker in Europe and other places. There is a 'grey' solution of "off label" prescribing but I'm not sure you'd want to do that with a cancer drug. Then again, with the right waivers, you might.

Re:Am I missing something?

[6ame633k]

Perhaps Health Insurance Companies could fund this type of research - they would stand to benefit directly due to the high costs associated with cancer treatment.

Re:Am I missing something?

[spike hay]

I'd like to point out that it is actually completely legal to prescribe drugs for "off label" uses. It is just very illegal to promote it.

Re:Am I missing something?

[dbrutus]

When healthcare is a public institution in real life, you have a few dilapidated hospitals and the really important stuff just doesn't get done. Europe used to have a vibrant pharma industry. Much of the R&D has fled to the US because of the legal climate engendered by attitudes just like the parent. In the FRG, the Bundeswehr has been stymied for years from eliminating the military draft because the Health Minister can't find the money to replace the conscientious objectors who are given to him to do their national service. Essentially, they're on a draft system of forced servitude because they can't fund enough bedpan cleaners without government coercion entering into the salary negotiations.

In poorer countries, it just gets worse.

Re:Am I missing something?

[Holmwood]

It's legal, but the obvious concern is liability. And that's a huge issue in the United States. Obstetricians now do a lot of C-sections. Not because it's better or safer (it's probably not), but because trial lawyers were very successful over the last 10-15 years in painting the C-section as "safer" anytime something went wrong with a delivery. Without FDA approval, you're asking for your medical practice to be annihilated by any hungry lawyer that comes along. Moreover, the drug manufacturer is begging for annihilation like Dow Corning. Who cares about the science or the logical merits, there's billions to be made in law suits. Like it or not, patent protection seems to be the best model we've got for developing innovative new drugs. (No, I don't think software patents are a great idea). I can't see other countries with different regimens that have produced lots of innovative drugs like the US. And and incredibly slow FDA trials seem to be the best model so far for preventing bankruptcy. (Not, it should be said, for the patients as witness the relaxation of some rules in HIV and HCV treatments). I sadly can't see any effective model that beats out drug patent protection. If you can, name one in operation that is producing superior results. I can certainly see a number of models (see Canada, much of Europe) that beat out FDA trials. Holmwood

Re:Am I missing something?

[asuffield]

If any government-funded entity did this, the patent-funded corporations would scream "unfair competition!" and send their hordes of patent-funded lawyers and lobbyists to get them shut down.

Big money defends itself.

Re:Am I missing something?

[Fred_A]

In the short run this appears to benefit the consumer. In reality however, Company A is too smart to give a free ride to their competitors. The drug never gets developed and more people die.

Well, yes, but on the other hand a lot of money is saved on patent fees. Stop looking at the dark side of things. Sheesh.

For ages lots of people have fought for state funded research in drugs in Europe for this exact reason (well, among others, notably the fact that very few labs actually do any research any more). Affordable treatment (in Real Life, between 40 and 60% of the budget of a given medicinal drug is marketing related, this before profit is even factored in).

Bah, anyone who's had to do with the inner workings of a pharmaceutical lab knows that there's nothing to expect from them anyway. New treatments will come from other directions. The labs mostly recycle older molecules nowadays. A lot of them are among the most cynical corporations on the face of the planet (you thought the tobacco companies were bad, you've never met anyone from a pharma lab).

Re:Am I missing something?

[MrNaz]

Without getting into a long debate over this, I would just like to say that a *real* public healthcare sector incorporating research has never existed, and can't while insanely profitable companies in the US keep snapping up the best and brightest. In a globalized economy you can't have one country with a publically funded medical research sector as its top workers will always be stolen by Pfizer or SKB.

This proposition won't work while there is a majority of medical research conducted within the current Western capitalist paradigm. As long as people are allowed to profit from the delivery of medicine, those who see medicine as nothing more than a business will treat it as such.

Until governments realize that medical research needs to be treated and thought about a little differently than research into the latest greatest big TV screen technology we will have drugs that save lives restricted to only those who can pay for them. Personally, I see this as a despicable commodification of life itself, where there is the perverse belief that the market is a good mechanism for determining who's life is the most valuable to them and thus who should be allocated the scarce resource of medical treatment. Market forces are not a good way to allocate the resource of life, as life is neither a resource nor should financial capacity have any bearing on who should be allocated how much of it.

Re:Am I missing something?

[Chr0nik]

Well, a drug company would definitely not fund research of this kind if it meant a drop in sales of their cancer treatment drugs, in favor of the cancer cure drug. Drug companies are not interested in curing people. If they were, we'd have a cure for Aids, Addiction, the common cold, etc.

Why would a company sell you a relatively non toxic drug that cures your cancer in three months, when they can put you on interferon for two 6 month rounds of treatment. Even though the two 6 months of treatment make you lose your hair, all your body fat, make you suceptible to other diseases, and make you nauseous the entire time, with a complete lack of energy?

That would be like an oil company selling you a car that runs on water for cheaper than ford sells the petrol cars..

$$$$$

Re:Am I missing something?

[Dachannien]

Your finger is pointing in the wrong place. Drug companies are a benefit to medicine, but there's no reason that public money can't act alongside private money to accomplish a benefit for the public. The biggest thing that prevents people from making use of public money for the pharmaceutical industry isn't the drug companies, though. It's the threat of litigation if the result of public research - sent forth into use by the general populace - has harmful, perhaps deadly, side effects. The uber-rich drug companies can absorb a fair number of lawsuits directed their way, but Doctor Joe Schmoe and friends at the local university have no such buffer available.

Put sweeping tort reforms in place, with special focus on the medical industry, and you'll fix many of the problems preventing research like DCA from going forth.

Re:Am I missing something?

[AHumbleOpinion]

Actually, you are overstating the work which the drug companies engage in. Most of the research is done in academia, under federal funding.

I believe that was the case many decades ago, but I don't think things have worked that way in modern times. Universities like to own patents too, it is a revenue stream for them as well. The work in academia may be more likely to be funded by industry than the feds.

Re:Am I missing something?

[Anonymous Coward]

Without a patent or exclusive ability to manufacture a drug, that marketing money goes right down the drain as soon as a patient reaches the pharmacy. i.e. Dr write a prescription for Lorcet(tm), pharma asks patient "are generics okay?" patient almost invariably will say "yes!" whenever that's an option.

Re:Am I missing something?

[tbo]

...a *real* public healthcare sector incorporating research... can't [exist] while insanely profitable companies in the US keep snapping up the best and brightest. In a globalized economy you can't have one country with a publically funded medical research sector as its top workers will always be stolen by Pfizer or SKB.

In other words, socialism can't compete with capitalism. To elaborate, you can't socialize just medical research, and expect that to work. The "best and brightest", or at least a large chunk of them, will leave med research for some other sector where there's still a free market and they can get paid according to the value of their contributions. Are you going to socialize the entire economy, and have the government start dictating pay for everyone?

Market forces are not a good way to allocate the resource of life, as life is neither a resource nor should financial capacity have any bearing on who should be allocated how much of it.

To paraphrase Churchill, markets are the worst way of allocating resources, except for all the other ways we've tried. Medical care is a scarce resource. It may disgust you that money can buy better care, but the alternative is even worse. Countries like Canada with supposedly-universal healthcare really have no such thing--they have government-rationed health care. Here's an example: my grandmother, who lives in Canada and is in her eighties, had a problem with her hand. It resulted in her being in fairly bad pain every day, and made it impossible for her to use the hand for most things. The problem was easily treatable, but, because of her age, she was told she'd have to wait about a year for the surgery. My parents ended up taking her to an illegal* private clinic to get the surgery done at a cost of a few grand. Her hand is fine now, but she'd probably still be waiting if she'd stayed with in the system. Market forces: 1, Government managed care: 0.

Letting the government manage your care means they get to decide whether or not you are valuable enough to be worth treating. Doesn't having the government judge whether you are worth treating scare you, even just a little? I'm not advocating the libertarian philosophy of zero government involvement in medical care, and I think it's good that we have some sort of medical safety net for those who can't afford insurance, but giving the government total control over medical care would be a nightmare.

* Canadian law makes it illegal to charge for services that are covered under the Canada Health Care Act, but in the western provinces there are a number of private clinics that openly but illegally provide such services for a fee.

Re:Am I missing something?

[Anonymous Coward]

If an ostensibly democratic government doesn't have the balls to tell big money to go fuck itself, then it's really not much of a democracy, is it?

Re:Am I missing something?

[maxume]

So where are the people that should be creating not-for-profit drug companies? It should be entirely possible, if you aren't chasing profits, you can theoretically pay your researchers more than somebody who is beholden to greedy shareholders. With the tax breaks, it should work even better. Perhaps it is hellishly expensive and risky?

Take Vioxx as an example; when it came out, it was heralded, finally the drug companies are developing new non addictive pain killers, but then, ooooops, there are some long term side effects that lead to a slight increase in heart attacks(sure, in relative terms the increase was enormous, but in absolute terms, risk generally went from vanishingly small to vanishingly small), so skewer the greedy lying cheating bastards!

My father died of colon cancer over a decade ago. I recently had a revelation regarding his treatment; medically, it was a success, he survived it for 5 years. Trust me, that isn't particularly satisfying, but I do see it as the proper way to look at the situation. Attempting to throw in a point, 'this shit is hard'.

As far as not treating medicine like a business and the despicable commoditization of life, realize that we live in a world of finite resources; that means that those finite resources have to be apportioned in some fashion, hopefully as equitably as possible, but at some point, somebody ends up deciding that treating patient B is in fact a better 'value' for society than treating patient A. Solve the finite resource problem and all your wishes come true. Until then, we need to decide if government can fairly tell the difference between somebody who worked his ass off and needs a new knee and a lazy drunk who needs a new liver. Note that the market generally does a really good job of rewarding the guy who worked his ass off.

Re:Am I missing something?

[erroneus]

Now *THAT* is something I could get behind.

Right now, the healthcare system is being driven by those who make the most profit from it. There's lots of incentive to treat with no incentive to cure.

On the other hand, medical insurers have LOTS of incentive to promote preventative and curing meaures. I'd like to see some sort of requirement for medical insurers to grant portions of their windfall profits for medical research... give them some sort of tax break or something as compensation.

Re:Am I missing something?

[EllisDees]

>That would be like an oil company selling you a car that runs on water for cheaper than ford sells the petrol cars..

If I could design a car that ran on water, you can bet that I'd sell it regardless what the oil companies want. Likewise, if someone invented a cure for any of the diseases you listed, they could get rich selling it, and would.

Re:Am I missing something?

[hikerhat]

Are you getting your public money from the magic public money tree, or from 'those with cash'?

Re:Am I missing something?

[The_Wilschon]

But if the defense lawyers just say "Well, you had no plans to develop it yourself, and besides, once it is developed, we are handing out the blueprint for free.", then the patent-funded lawyers ought to have no case. Whether or not they do have a case is a matter of what the laws on the books are, and I don't know that. But, if the laws on the books say they do have a case, then those laws have become a problem and need to be changed. The lobbyists might be more of a problem, which perhaps merely indicates that we need more restrictions on corporate lobbying.

Re:Am I missing something?

[arminw]

......You just administer it "off label", if you dare......

I would suspect that anyone who has terminal cancer and knows about this would dare. If the substance is available in chemical stores, then anyone could get it without a doctors approval. Of course if this became widely known, the Government would probably make it prescription only at best or totally illegal at worst. After all, a really effective cure for cancer would be devastating financially to the medical and pharmaceutical industries and would NEVER be allowed to come to market unless these established greedy operators could make a huge pile of money.

Re:Am I missing something?

[sp3d2orbit]

The drug companies would like us to believe that patents are necessary to bring new drugs to market. Those who "drank the kool-aid" claim that without patents generic drugs would make drug research unprofitable.

What is profitable?

Pfizer pulled in $51.2 billion in 2006 with $8 billion in profits.
Merck wasn't as "profitable", with only $4.6 billion in profits on $22 billion total income.
The top 10 drug makers are worth $1.125 trillion and made $50 billion.

But, what these numbers don't show is that there are barely more than 10 major players making any significant money in drugs. Is that because there is so little money to be made? A mere $50 billion?

I can't figure out how a free market would allocate so much wealth into so few hands. Unless the market wasn't free to start with.

Drug companies use patents to subdivide the treatable medical domain into discrete markets that can be monopolized or duopolized so long as the patent stands. It is true that without the patents there would be more generics to compete with. That's not a bad thing.

The drug company who first develops a medicine still has a competitive advantage, even without a patent. They will be first to market. They have the opportunity to define the brand in the eyes of the consumer. Brands like Viagra and Botox have value to the user that a patent doesn't provide.

Drug patents are not really "necessary" to make a profit, but they are necessary to make such huge profits.

Re:Am I missing something?

[arminw]

.......Market forces are not a good way to allocate the resource of life, as life is neither a resource nor should financial capacity have any bearing on who should be allocated how much of it........

That is a noble sentiment. Unfortunately, medicine, like food, clothing, shelter and other survival needs of life IS a resource, purchasable, like any other. Should governments get into providing these also from the public trough? Where is there *any* government that has ever GIVEN anything to anybody, where they have not taken it away from someone else? Rich folks in Canada come to the US because they do not want to get in line seemingly forever, so they can pay for and get fast medical treatment for conditions that are not immediate life threatening emergencies.

Re:Am I missing something?

[Swave An deBwoner]

Here is an interesting article about where the health care money actually goes. Purportedly, about 30% goes to the insurance companies, not to doctors, nurses, pharmaceutical companies, or anyone else actually involved in delivering medical care.

(The article is free, though you have to sign up, for free, with Medscape before getting access to it.)

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/508911

Re:Am I missing something?

[arminw]

...... Likewise, if someone invented a cure for any of the diseases you listed, they could get rich selling it, and would......

Only if that someone was an already established rich drug company that is able to pay off the FDA, patent and other lawyers and pay for advertising.

Re:Am I missing something?

[codemachine]

You realize there is a much easier counter-example where the socialists win, don't you?

Here's an example: my grandmother, who lives in the USA, had a problem with her hand. It resulted in her being in fairly bad pain every day, and made it impossible for her to use the hand for most things. The problem was easily treatable, but, because she couldn't afford the surgery, she was told she'd she could not have it.

Market forces: 0, Government managed care: 1.

Letting the market manage your care means your wallet gets to decide whether or not you are valuable enough to be worth treating, and how soon they will get around to treating you.

The purpose of not giving market forces control is to avoid people buying their way to the front of the line. Government managed care is much more fair to everyone. Yes, sometimes there are seemingly arbitrary rules which are frustrating, because there isn't enough health care money to do everything for everyone. But it seems the decisions of a government or health authority are a better way to solve such issues than just giving better care to those with the most money. Even with a safety net in place, do you think those using that safety net would get the quick, high quality treatment that the more wealthy pay for? Or would poor (literaly) grandma be told that she has to wait a year, just like the richer Canadian grandma in your example?

Seems that people aren't really happy with either system though. Neither system is anywhere near perfect. I can't say I blame anyone who buys their care from an "illegal" clinic or in the USA when they are stuck on a waiting list in Canada, as I'd probably consider doing the same (I'm lucky enough to be able to afford that choice).

Re:Am I missing something?

[dbrutus]

You're always going to die of something and the pharma/medical community will be there managing, treating, and curing it as much as they can. Any one particular segment might get hit if a cheap cure eliminated their bread and butter work but they'll shift over to something else, no worries. In short, no devastation to be had so no point in buying up political muscle to make it illeal.

So granny doesn't die of that cancer and takes her diabetes, blood pressure, osteoporosis, and glaucoma medication for 10 extra years when she just drops dead from boredom. Oooh, what a financial loss overall for the med/pharma complex, NOT!

Re:Am I missing something?

[tbo]

You realize there is a much easier counter-example where the socialists win, don't you?

Except my example really happened to my grandma, and your scenario is fictional. Anything can happen in fiction. My scenario is only one of many true stories I can tell you about the Canadian system screwing over my family members.

Also, are you really any better off if you don't get the surgery because of government wait lists than if you don't get it because of cost?

Government managed care is much more fair to everyone.

Fair is not the only important value. It's better to have an unfair system where the mean quality of service is good, rather than one in which the service is uniformly bad.

As a graduate student, I'm poor. My wife recently graduated and is starting her own business. Despite having very little money (rent alone takes about half our income), we can afford US medical insurance (which we pay for). Most people who don't have insurance in the US don't have it because it's a lower priority to them than cable TV or whatever, not because it's simply unaffordable.

Re:Am I missing something?

[dbrutus]

Unfortunately for your counter-example, most of the time it's a crock. If you're too poor, the US government comes up with the cash via Medicaid (we do finance healthcare for the poor). If you're retired, you qualify under Medicare. If you're too young for Medicare, you can borrow the money on the strength of your future labor. If you're a visitor or an illegal alien, you still get lifesaving treatment for free (again via Medicaid). In short, there are a variety of ways to get a surgery if the problem is money, none of which are illegal. Also, when your wallet dictates treatment, you actually figure out whether fixing what ails you is worth the expense. Sometimes it is not. For example, I've never gone and got my deviated sceptum fixed up and just live with the fact that I have slightly less nasal airflow than normal.

I agree that neither system is perfect but it's nowhere near a matter of parity between the two alternatives. Free markets advertise their problems and reward those who solve them. Socialist systems almost never do.

Re:Am I missing something?

[Mathinker]

> Oooh, what a financial loss overall for the med/pharma complex, NOT!

Don't forget, though, that the government will take a significant financial loss on the extra 10 years of Medicare they will have to provide her.

Re:Am I missing something?

[OakLEE]

The main problem I have with public money is that if you fund any project with public money, you create a bureaucracy who's goal is to get more and more money, often at the expense of their set goal. Take the war on drugs for example, do you think the DEA, FBI, Coast Guard, and Boarder Patrol actually want there to be absolutely zero drugs getting into this country? No, because then their usefulness diminishes, their funding gets cut, and they have to downsize.

In the case of a cure for cancer, do you think a government funded agency would do much better. If government funded cancer specialists develop a cure, they'll get no more funding, and none of the profits from the drugs since the government would own the rights to it. They would effectively have a perverse incentive to string out development as long as possible, because unlike a corporation, the government is not going to cut them (as fast) if they fail to produce results.

Personally, if the government has to get monetarily involved, I would rather see them offer a lump sum reward, say $50 to $100 billion dollars to the first company that gets a cure FDA approved. That would take care of the trouble of monopoly, and probably induce an arms race for the cure (assuming the reward is big enough to cover the costs of development).

Re:Am I missing something?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Brands like Viagra and Botox have value to the user that a patent doesn't provide.

You are assuming that the user can directly influence the decision whether to use the brand-name drug or a generic. It's obviously not in the interest of his insurer to let him do that.

Re:Am I missing something?

[SamSim]

Why wouldn't the government fund that research? Isn't it the government's job to ensure the welfare of its citizens?

Re:Am I missing something?

[vandan]

I think those wish cash are a prime target. Are you suggesting that those who can't afford health care get out of your sight and die?

Re:Am I missing something?

[Anonymous Coward]

...face competition from generic drug makers who've invested very little in bringing their product to market.

Oh, I see: those selfish freeloading bastards wouldn't spare a dime for common good and help out our heroic inventing pharma company to save the world!

It is false argument (and blame projection). None ever asks "those selfish freeloading bastards" if they would chip in their share of investment (and with costs shared between multitude of them, they would probably agree), because it is all about control, about getting whole cream from the milk (, ripping patients off ) and giving nothing to others, it is not about others being unwilling to participate in sharing expenses. If expenses where main concern, the law could step forward and force every pharma company which markets the competing product to pay own share of expenses to original manufacturer, instead of banning them from producing it. First follower would have to pay up front half of all expenses, subsequent "club members" would pay shares to those already in, ... etc.

However, that scheme would mean lower ROI for original manufacturer and all that sacrifice is for what? So that some unimportant (poor, old, foreign, marginal) persons' lives would last a little longer! Whadaya guys want? To live forever?

Re:Am I missing something?

[somersault]

Not.. the government? Who let them into the country? Quick, you must take up arms and vanquish the evil!! Someone call the police!!! The Army!! The President!!

Re:Am I missing something?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't know where you learnt your maths, but according to mine, $8b profit on $51.2b income of Pfizer equates to approx 15.6%, whereas $4.6b profit on $22b income of Merck equates to approx 20.9% - how is a company making approx 20.9% profit not as profitable as one making only approx 15.6%? Perhaps it's the math you learnt at school?

Re:Am I missing something?

[Unc-70]

Acutally, I think you are underestimating the risk involved for the pharmaceutical companies. When you say 'Most of the research is done in academia' it depends on how you qualify 'most'. If it's in terms of cost, then I suspect that is not the case, if it is in terms of time spent identifying targets, then you may be right, if it is in terms of generating compounds and doing pre-clinical development, then I suspect you are wrong.

Again, where you say 'Then some drug company buys the rights to something that it considers promissing, after most of the risk is gone. It then runs the final trials, etc., and gets the patents.' I think you are wrong. Look at the attrition rate for late stage compounds (The Current Odds) and you see that a lot of the risk is in late stage trials. 11% success rate through the clinic != low risk.

Re:Am I missing something?

[sheepweevil]

Its on the market already, but not approved for use against cancer. Wouldn't the drug need to go through another round of FDA testing for its use against cancer?

Re:Am I missing something?

[ACMENEWSLLC]

>>The drug never gets developed and more people die.

Ok, so that is the USA. Is the USA the only company that develops drugs in the entire world? Can't a socialist country take this on? Or what about grant money for R&D, such as that which colleges get?

Seems we are thinking vary narrow minded here.

Re:Am I missing something?

[Rich0]

I'm a big fan of the pharma status quo, and am opposed to patent reform.

However, I'd support your idea 100%. If we want to explore the idea of cheap medicines the answer is to allow both public and private R&D. Public R&D would lead to cheap public-domain drugs. Private R&D would lead to expensive patented drugs. Consumers would get everything they have today, and more. Then, society can look at the costs of public R&D and decide how to best use it (maybe it should be expanded, maybe it is too expensive and we should just accept expensive drugs or just let the government reimburse for them, or maybe the public should focus on certain areas that lack private investment).

Nothing is free - it might be cheaper to have unpatented drugs, or it might be cheaper to pay $5/pill but save all the taxpayer R&D costs. The way to find out is to try both and see what works - not to just knee-jerk ban the pharma industry. Competition is best for the consumer - a ban is good for bureaucrats who don't want to compete. If bureaucrats compete well consumers will get rid of expensive pharma, but there will always be private industry to keep the NIH honest.

A drug like this might be a good starting point. However, don't be surprised if the government spends half a billion dollars just to find out that it causes kidney failure - this happens all the time in private pharma R&D.

Re:Am I missing something?

[Rich0]

I tend to disagree with you regarding the relative contributions of private and public R&D. There is a big difference between a molecule with activity in an assay and a drug.

However, I do agree with your proposal re patents on the outcome of public R&D. That only seems reasonable to me. Alternative molecules probably should be patentable, but the public sector should also carry their R&D further (up to FDA approval if possible).

I'm opposed to changes in the patent regime, but I don't see a problem with public and private competition - it should only help consumers.

Now, after this has been doing on for 10 years I think we should look at what we're spending publicly vs what we're getting. If it would be cheaper to scrap the public R&D and just pay retail for drugs we should do so. Most likely there will be some sort of balance. On the other hand, if the NIH is giving taxpayers more bang for the buck then EXPAND EXPAND EXPAND. But allow the private sector to compete - it keeps the bureaucrats honest.

I just hope the knee-jerk ban-drug-patents crowed doesn't win out. I think that this would be tragic for the public - it is just a tragedy that we won't actually witness (nobody counts lives lost to diseases that don't have cures - only ones lost to diseases that have unaffordable cures). The public and private sectors don't have to be mutually-exclusive, and competition never hurt anyone.

Re:Am I missing something?

[nfiertel]

the University of Alberta has one of the most prestigious medical schools and research facilities in Canada and I suggest that such a discovery will not be buried by corporate greed as Canada has Universal Medicare for all of its citizens and since WE taxpayers want the best medicine for the price, there is a strong incentive to test DCA which is already known to be a safe drug. It need only be tested for efficacy with double blind studies which if found to exceptionally improve medical outcome will no doubt be fast tracked as happened to other drugs in the past. I must comment that I find it sad that in the US, the logic of profit supercedes real medical progress such as the synthesis of hormones for women that have dangerous side effects but can be patented rather than production of compounds identical to the natural ones that cannot be patented and thus are not easily obtained. There are many examples of similar corporate tactics. I hope that there is a groundswell and demand for serious medical progress no matter the profit motive. This means that government must pay the tab since stockholders would not. Call it Socialised Medicine if you must, but Canadians live longer, have much better medical outcomes and it costs our society much less per capita than the system that the US suffers under. People here do not worry about what happens when they get sick in terms of the medical costs. We get what we need and when we need it contrary to the lies that are spread speciously by medical corporations in the US who naturally stand to lose bigtime if Americans demand and get publicly funded medicine. DCA could very well be the wedge that breaks open the medical armour that has allowed scantly effective drugs to garner gigantic profits.

Re:Am I missing something?

[lent]

[This might give some background on how DCA fights cancer via mitochondria]

Researchers at University of Alberta have found that dichloroacetate (DCA) is able to cause tumor regression in a number of human cancers growing in animals. DCA seems to awaken mitochondria, which are present in normal animal cells but dormant in cancer cells, and cancerous tumor growth is stopped.

While DCA has been used for decades to treat mitochondrial diseases in humans, patients are cautioned no human beings have gone through clinical trials using DCA to treat cancer.

Funny

[StarKruzr]

I thought the United States had the monopoly on horridly broken patent systems.

Re:Funny

[chimpo13]

Canada is the 51st State.

Re:Funny

[rumblin'rabbit]

Ahem. The U.S. is the 11'th through 60'th province.

We haven't figured out what to do with D.C. yet. Maybe give it back to the Indians, since it isn't good for anything anymore. Then they can rename that damn football team.

Re:Funny

[jours]

I don't believe we have a monopoly on it yet, but we're working on securing a patent.

Re:Funny

[Dr Caleb]

It's not a broken system. On my local news (Edmonton, home of the UofA) they are specifically NOT including drug companies in funding the trials, because they want the drug to be cheap.

FTA:

"A small, non-toxic molecule may soon be available as an inexpensive treatment for many forms of cancer, including lung, breast and brain tumours, say University of Alberta researchers."

Sir Frederick Banting, (another Canadian) did the same thing with his patent for Insulin, so that drug companies would never have a monopoly on something needed for people to live.

Re:Funny

[XxtraLarGe]

If it will help anybody, I'll gladly put a patent on this Cancer-curing drug!

Re:Funny

[Anonymous Coward]

Canada is the 51st State.

Like [insert first 6 of George Carlin's "7 words"] hell we are!

Moo

[Chacham]

Cancer Drug May Not Get A Chance Due to Lack of Patent

Note the word "may".

But because it's not patented or owned by any drug firm, it would be an inexpensive drug to administer. And researchers may have a difficult time finding money for further research.

Speculation.

Dr. Dario Altieri, of the University of Massachusetts, said the drug is exactly what doctors need because it could limit side-effects for patients. But there are "market considerations" that drug companies would have to take into account.

Buesiness fact.

Michelakis remains hopeful he will be able to secure funding for further research.

As anybody would.

"We hope we can attract the interest of universities here in Canada and in the United States," said Michelakis.

Excellent.

--

The only news here is the drug itself and how things are moving along well. Yet, a speculation is reported as the main factor, when there is no supporting information for it. Did they even ask for funding yet? The researchers are taking the market into consideration, and the reporter seems to want to make a big deal out of it.

Even if the pharmaceutical companies do turn it down, and even if they do turn it down on the basis of no profit, it just means that the researches will have to do more presentation to find funding. If there is obvious promise in this (which there's have to be to get a pharmaceutical company to invest loads of cash) some organization, or college, or government grant will help pay for the studies.

Re:Moo

[Stanistani]

Eh, if this is shown effective even in preliminary tests, it can be tweaked by a structural biochemist (move a hydroxyl or sumfin' to make it easier to cross transport barriers or increase potency) and then you can patent it and market it to great praise and profit...

Re:Moo

[Anonymous Coward]

If there is obvious promise in this (which there's have to be to get a pharmaceutical company to invest loads of cash) some organization, or college, or government grant will help pay for the studies.

Sure thing buddy, where are we going to get 350 billion dollars for that??!

Re:Moo

[Anonymous Coward]

If the drug shows promise then a generic drug manufacturer will produce it at low cost. All a patent gives is a certain perioud of exclusivity to the patent holder so they can recoup the money spent in developing the drug. After the exclusivity period it's a free for all for the other companies to get the drug to market. No company is going to pass up a 'cure' for cancer. Imagine the pr benefit for a company that produces a landmark drug at a loss. You can't get better advertising.

Re:Moo

[Anonymous Coward]

501c3's around cancer research should fund this.

Re:Moo

[dave562]

Even if the pharmaceutical companies do turn it down, and even if they do turn it down on the basis of no profit, it just means that the researches will have to do more presentation to find funding.

Maybe they should go peddle their wares to the Gates Foundation. =)

Re:Moo

[malfunct]

This seems like exactly the thing we SHOULD be spending federal research grant dollars on. I am sure that the cancer societies in america would be happy to fund something if it is truely as promising as the article states. Once the drug has approval it will be a no brainer for every drug company out there to pick it up as it would be wildy popular and though the price would quickly drop to the marginal cost and there would be no monopoly profits, it is still wise to sell as it is a perfectly good business idea to operate at 0 economic profit.

Re:Moo

[argel]

Actually, the OP is fairly on target though this case might generate enough interest to be an exception. What people are overlooking is in the US to sell a drug it has to be FDA approved and goign through that process is expensive. If the brand names see no profit in it they will not fund the approval process even though they can afford to. Which leaves the generics which normally do not have or want to spend that amount of money. Since this has already occured with other drugs (e.g. readily avaialble in Europe) it seems reasonable to expect soemtihng similar to happen in this situation.

Re:Moo

[Andy Dodd]

Or you can patent one of the production processes for it.

Someone mentioned the inventor of insulin trying to ensure a "no-monopoly" situation, but since the advent of human insulin produced by genetically engineered bacteria (as opposed to from the pancreas of slaughtered cows/pigs), a select few companies (Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk and that's about it with one exception) have dominated the insulin market since the 1970s (Insulin was discovered in the early 1920s, by the way) due to patents on:

Methods of producing insulin (specifically recombinant DNA origin insulins)
Methods of tweaking insulin to be absorbed/used by the body over a longer period of time by adding stuff to the injected mixture (Lente, Ultralente, NPH, etc)
Methods of producing insulin with "faster than natural" activity profiles by tweaking the molecular structure itself (Humalog and Novolog)
Methods of producing insulin with extremely long "peakless" activity profiles by a combination of the above two techniques (Lantus and Levemir) - BTW this is where the one exception to the Lilly/Nordisk dominance is. Lantus is made by Aventis.

From one "unpatented" drug that according to this article will not have an interest from big pharma, history shows that global market dominance can still be established. I have a feeling drug companies right and left will be racing to tweak this new drug to make a better version or better production process (which happens to be patentable).

Re:Moo

[SCAQ]

But because it's not patented or owned by any drug firm, it would be an inexpensive drug to administer. And researchers may have a difficult time finding money for further research. Speculation. Dr. Dario Altieri, of the University of Massachusetts, said the drug is exactly what doctors need because it could limit side-effects for patients. But there are "market considerations" that drug companies would have to take into account. Buesiness fact. ... You should do Geico commercials

Re:Moo

[billcopc]

Sir, you make it too easy.

What people are overlooking is in the US to sell a drug it has to be FDA approved and goign through that process is expensive.

Well then, Fuck em I say.. you can keep your cancer if that's what the FDA says. Here's to me thinking pharmaceutical companies are a bad idea, but I'm a goddamned squirrel-loving socialist Canadian aren't I ? :P The very fact that there needs to be a financial incentive for these organizations to even look for a cure is pure evil. If medical research is to benefit the population at large, then it should be owned and controlled by the population at large. Up here, we call it the government. It is our proxy to act on behalf of the citizens in the practice of democracy. If the government runs a pharmaceutical operation, it creates the same jobs and produces the same output as a privately-owned company, only it essentially runs as a non-profit, so the drugs are not only fairly priced, but it removes a certain degree of racketeering. If there is no real money to be made anymore, then there will be less of a disincentive to actually cure things versus treating them for life. What if we could cure AIDS, cancer, diabetes ? Right now, a cure to either one of those widespread diseases would severely cripple the economy, either by stripping away a portion of pharmaceutical profits, or by having the cure so expensive that it creates a tyrannical "pay or die" culture that forces people to cripple their finances and their families' as well.

In my book, capitalism and health should not mix.

Re:Moo

[shotgunefx]

It has and does happen.

Look no farther than the lack of synthetic HDL. Heart disease is a huge problem, yet no one ever made synthetic HDL as they couldn't patent it until ApoA-1 Milano. A mutant version found in a small Italian town. Mutant == Patent == To market.

I really need to find the original story I found on it. Not so remarkable in the drug news, but it actually stated the reason that HDL was not made even though it could potentially save so many lives, was they wouldn't invest any money in it due to the lack of patentability. A shockingly rare moment of brutal honestly in the news.

Why didn't the goverment step up as it has to pay for it one way or another? Because they are in the drug companies pocket.

Re:Moo

[nodrogluap]

The key problem though is regulatory approval. No generic drug manufacturer is going to pony up the cash for the extensive FDA drug trials required, if another generic can copy them as soon as it is approved. The only real solution for these potential drugs is funding by the government (unlikely), or disease-specific charities (e.g. the Cancer Foundation paying for the trials). Charity-based funding is happening now for some rarer diseases that aren't worth the big Pharma's time.

Re:Moo

[dryeo]

Another possibity (and I know nothing about the generic market) is the generic companies forming a co-op and sharing the price of the studies and then the sales

Re:Moo

[maxume]

"capitalism and health should not mix"

This goes too far. Fantastically rich societies can afford to provide universal baseline care, and should attempt to. That includes doing research to increase the quality and efficacy of that care.

On the other hand, eccentric gajillionaires who want to live an additional six months should not be prevented from spending that money on whatever the hell they want. I guess if you don't believe in gajillionaires that would be a problem, but you were implying that capitalism was ok some of the time.

Re:Moo

[Breakfast Pants]

Note the word "may".
Clever display of reading skills.
 

Speculation.
Yes, it is.
 

Buesiness fact.
Spelling error.
 

As anybody would.
Insightful commentary.
 

Excellent.
Mr. Burns?

Re:Moo

[arminw]

.....No company is going to pass up a 'cure' for cancer......

I would not be so sure of that. If the money they make for cancer "treatment" exceeds what they might make from a "cure", they'll opt for the treatment cash every time. Pharmaceutical companies know that a cure of a given disease means that the potential for profit is gone after the cure eliminates that disease. Therefore they concentrate on ongoing, long term treatments for medical problems. If this drug were truly a "cure" for cancer, it would never see the light of day, even if it were patentable. Treatments are far more profitable than cures.

Re:Moo

[arminw]

....501c3's around cancer research should fund this......

Not likely to happen. If this were truly a "cure" then any need for further cancer research would no longer be needed and so these institutes would have to find a new business. People seldom try deliberately to work themselves out of a job.

Re:Moo

[salec]

Not likely to happen. If this were truly a "cure" then any need for further cancer research would no longer be needed and so these institutes would have to find a new business. People seldom try deliberately to work themselves out of a job.

Unless they could immediately retire on reward after it is done and never HAVE TO work again in their lives... Which could be arranged for something of that importance...

Re:Moo

[Rich0]

Yes, but insulin is already approved for market use, so nobody had to pay for clinical trials. That means that all you need to do is make it cheaply enough to make a profit, which isn't hard.

This is a new drug, which means a few hundred million dollars in clinical trials. If somebody picks up the bill for getting the drug approved, I'm sure lots of companies would sell it, and it would be cheap.

Re:Moo

[billcopc]

The problem with capitalism is the fact that it's only somewhat limited by the law. It's the reality that you can kill someone with a little money, and with a fair chunk more you can even get away with it. Either you shoot them dead and hire a crack team of lawyers, or you start a pharmaceutical company and basically hold sick people at virtual gunpoint until they cough up enough cash to "earn" their antidote. What happens when people are no longer "sick enough" to sustain a company's growth forecast ? Are they going to "create a need" ? How about a new strain of diabetes that is resistant to all but Company X's products ? It may sound like a bad old sci-fi flick but you have to remember that a corporate has no soul, no conscience. It is a simple machine that creates profit, nothing more. When that machine grows big enough, its collective power is stronger than the individual voices that make it up. In a board room of top execs looking at a chart that shows them no longer being rich execs 5 years from now, I'd venture that maybe 10-15% of them will flirt with the idea of creating a disease if it will revive corporate (and personal) profitability. That percentage will only grow as time passes and the world becomes a more crowded, angry place to live.

Me, I just wish Darwinism would gain fame and kill two birds with one stone: 1. sickly people die young as they should, to ease the burden on everyone else and 2. less sick people means less power to the pharmaceutical companies... oh and 3. I'm just not a nice person to begin with :)

profit....

[Anonymous Coward]

"curing" an ailment isn't anywhere near as profitable as "treating" an ailment...

Re:profit....

[Anonymous Coward]

That makes the assumption that we have the scientific ability to do either those. It's not like curing complex diseases like diabetes and cancer is easy and we get to pick the bottle labeled "treatment" off the shelf instead of the "cure" bottle.

Re:profit....

[Frozen Void]

Modern medicine can easily treat symptoms.
Thats all its good for.As a nasty side-effect it causes more diseases then it supresses,requiring the victims to buy other pills.Until they wither and die.

Generic drug manufacturers

[panaceaa]

Wouldn't companies like Barr Labs, whose entire business model is to develop drugs that have fallen out of patent protection, be interested in developing a drug that's not patent protected? It could be a major windfall for them since they're able to develop a new drug before existing brands can be established in the space. The only trick I see is that Barr Labs isn't as used to dealing with the Federal Drug Administration for drug approval, so it might take some hiring in key areas of the company. But these don't seem like insurmountable challenges given the potential market size and the business model match with existing out-of-patent drugs.

Re:Generic drug manufacturers

[jfengel]

It's not just their lack of expertise. Getting a drug through level 3 trials is expensive: it takes a lot of (often paid) subjects, and doctors and nurses to spend time with those subjects, and a battery of tests to be done on those subjects. This money is spent over years to ensure that the pill is safe and effective before you have even a single paying patient. Paying the subjects is actually the cheap part.

And there's the possibility that once they've spent all that money, it could fail. Maybe the pill just doesn't work. Maybe there are side effects: look at the way Merck is getting hammered for producing a highly effective pill (Vioxx) that just happened, to, well, kill a few people.

Barr makes their money by letting somebody else pay for all that, and then coming in a few years later and charging a lot less. It's the usual problem: the second pill costs $.49, but the first pill costs $75,000,000.

Re:Generic drug manufacturers

[pla]

Wouldn't companies like Barr Labs, whose entire business model is to develop drugs that have fallen out of patent protection, be interested in developing a drug that's not patent protected?

Nope.

Manufacturing off-patent generics differs from bringing a new unpatentable product to market in one very key aspect - Off-patent drugs already have FDA approval.

Finding substance-X doesn't cost that much... Pharmaceutical companies have developed techniques for rapidly trying every plausible variant of a given structure in one huge parallel batch. The cost comes from taking those chemicals that show promise, performing clinical trials to show safety and efficacy, getting FDA approval, and then actually marketing the drug.

And highlighting just about the worst aspect of capitalism, the problem here doesn't just come from whether or not a company could take a likely candidate, do all that I mention above, and still turn a profit - The problem comes from the fact that seconds after one company foots the bill for all that, the rest can then start production and undercut the first player. So, rather than making less money than the competition, no one will take that leap.



Some will gloatingly point out that drug patents exist in the first place to address that exact problem. Of course, that completely misses the point that in this case, the patent system has still failed to solve the problem, and if anything, exacerbated it.

Re:Generic drug manufacturers

[LehiNephi]

While the statement that "pharmaceutical companies may not be interested in funding further research if the treatment won't make them a profit" quite speculative, it does raise other questions. It's a matter of capitalism that if a company can't make a profit by performing some action, they likely won't perform that action. But the premise of that statement exposes a very interesting attribute of the name-brand pharmaceutical industry: they can't compete on even grounds.

We can't argue that drug companies invest an enormous amount on researching and developing new drugs, and patents help them ensure that research costs are (eventually) recovered with some profit. And that the drug companies also spend ridiculous amounts of money on marketing those drugs (that's a topic for another rant). What we have here, though, is a drug that has already gone through a lot of R&D (so those costs are gone), and won't require much marketing (there are LOTS of people out there who would just JUMP on the chance of a cure). The only major cost left is manufacturing. Which is minuscule. All of a sudden, all drug manufacturers are on an even playing field: No license fees, no patents, just the ability to produce lots at low cost and sell it.

If the major drug companies are unwilling to pursue this kind of drug, it means one thing: their manufacturing (and to a lesser extent, marketing) is so inefficient that they can't make a profit without having exclusive rights to produce the drug and the ability to jack up prices with impunity.

Re:Generic drug manufacturers

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as I know, there was never a clinical trial that showed a statistically significant difference in mortality for Vioxx and placebo. The safety problem with Vioxx was it causing MIs and cerebrovascular strokes.

Re:Generic drug manufacturers

[centerspace]

Since the drug is already in use, they'll only have to do Phase III trials, right? Granted that's probably a huge cost.

Re:Generic drug manufacturers

[Anonymous Coward]

Barr doesn't develop drugs that are off patent. They copy drugs that are off patent. This saves them the bother of paying for all that R&D and clinical testing.

Re:Generic drug manufacturers

[pathos49]

first this is an existing drug. You should have read the article more carefully. It is used to treat lactic acidosis so all that needs to be done is efficacy studies. While expensive, it is not as expensive as one would think becuase the Hoispitals tht DEVELOP ORPHAN drugs already exist and it is clear that this will be used as an adjuvant treatment, not a first line. The cost of the studies will be more in the area of 20-40 million at most and will piggy back on existing studies

Re:Generic drug manufacturers

[jfengel]

I was not aware that the drug is already in use. If it is, you don't actually have to do anything: you can just get doctors to prescribe it off-label. (That's in the US; given that this is Alberta I can't say what the rules are.) You'd end up doing a Phase IV trial, which can be a lot cheaper if you can just get doctors to send in data.

Re:Generic drug manufacturers

[Anonymous Coward]

Vioxx was on the market for years before results from a new trial had it yanked. Your statement about all that needs to be done is efficacy analyses is clearly not true. All studies should have a safety component, even if the drug is already approved.

Re:Generic drug manufacturers

[Anonymous Coward]

From the article:
"For years, DCA -- or dichloroacetate -- has been used to treat children with inborn errors of metabolism due to mitochondrial diseases."

So it already has had human trials. If I recall correctly there is a fast track for approval of existing drugs for new purposes (or is this a planned change that is not yet in effect?). Should be much less expensive than getting approval for an entirely new drug, either way.

Re:Generic drug manufacturers

[centerspace]

Well, I think so. It says: For years, DCA -- or dichloroacetate -- has been used to treat children with inborn errors of metabolism due to mitochondrial diseases.

Re:Generic drug manufacturers

[jonbryce]

I would argue that the problem is not the patent system here, but the FDA approval process. It is creating a huge barrier to entry, and this is the reason we don't get this treatment.

Of course there should be restrictions in an otherwise free market to ensure that medicines are safe, but they need to be balanced against the risk that they become so onerous that we don't get the medicines at all. It looks like the balance is wrong in this particular case.

Re:Generic drug manufacturers

[steelfood]

I believe this compound has been in use for a long time, albeit for other higher-level purposes. This is merely a different application of the same compound. It's almost like taking asprin for heart disease instead of pain. Since the compound already exists in a FDA approved form, why then would the researchers have to go through the same trouble again? At the very least, they'd be able to cite the previous studies done for FDA approval, and that should speed up the process considerably.

Given this, I'd think it'd be easy for companies that make generics to start selling this.

I think any funding would be going into testing to further medical knowledge rather than to attain any form of approval for use.

Re:Generic drug manufacturers

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I heard about the Vioxx situation on NPR's Science Friday, that it was a confluence of bad events. The drug had a very narrow group of indications but was practically advertised as a general-use product. There are suggestions that off-label prescriptions were strongly recommended, carelessly using it to treat illnesses for which it was not tested. In some situations, having the drug is actually better than not having it (a debilitating painful illness vs a very small risk of death), but there apparently is no good way to restrict the use so that only the people that really do desperately need it will get it.

It's basically a case of too much of a good thing. IIRC, there are were suggestions of allowing restricted use but I don't remember what the deal is.

Re:Generic drug manufacturers

[Firethorn]

FDA approval is dependant upon application as well. It has to treat a specific problem.

So even if it's used for something else (somebody mentioned topical astringent), it'd have to be approved for use on cancer in a seperate trial.

Even then, they may have to redo some of the basic trials if it's been out long enough; standards are higher now.

Re:Generic drug manufacturers

[Firethorn]

Agreed. Maybe if we had a system where a charity or government office funded FDA testing for a few promising but non-patentable drug treatments each year. Even if it's only 1, it'd still help situation like this.

Re:Generic drug manufacturers

[maxume]

The withdrawal was basically P.R.. There seems to be a growing attitude that any risk is unacceptable; the Vioxx numbers before and after they got in trouble are basically the same. You are spot on though, if someone could get by on something else, the risk was enough for it to be a good idea.

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/354/11/11 96

Re:Generic drug manufacturers

[jso888]

I work in pharma, and I should point out that for generics sold in the United States, the manufacturer *always* has to deal with the FDA in terms of running one or more bioequivalency ("generic version works just as well as the brand name version") clinical trials, labeling and marketing issues, and so on. I suspect that Barr's regulatory affairs department is huge.

Re:Generic drug manufacturers

[jso888]

Drugs are approved for specific indications, doses, and delivery mechanisms. You generally need to run a separate group of clinical trials if the same drug that's approved for a particular disease is being considered for use with a different disease (of course, let's not get into the mess that is off-label prescriptions).

Re:Generic drug manufacturers

[jfengel]

A friend of mine went through the same PR in reverse: an allergy medication he favored was "discovered" by the manufacturer to have bad side effects at the same time as (a) the medication was about to go off-patent, and (b) a new medication from the same company without the bad side effects was introduced. That new medication didn't work nearly as well for him, but he can't get the old one because the FDA banned it. Fortunately for him, the Canadian government isn't so terrified of those side effects.

It's not as if...

[Billosaur]

...Big Pharma would do it for the betterment of all mankind -- no profit in that!

Interesting note: CNN is reporting that Cancer deaths have dropped for the second straight year.

Re:It's not as if...

[s20451]

...Big Pharma would do it for the betterment of all mankind -- no profit in that!

Yeah, it really sucked when the patent expired on Aspirin. Now nobody can buy one because businesses can't make money off it.

Memo: Something that flatters your prejudices is not the same as news.

Re:It's not as if...

[Anonymous Coward]

>...Big Pharma would do it for the betterment of all mankind -- no profit in that!

To point out the blatantly obvious, it's not their money to screw around with; it belongs to the owners, i.e. the stockholders.

How you would you feel if you suddenly stopped getting interest from your accounts just because your investment institution decided to give the money to a charitable cause?

Re:It's not as if...

[Billosaur]

Yeah, it really sucked when the patent expired on Aspirin. Now nobody can buy one because businesses can't make money off it.

Au contrair -- the development of Aspirin (trademarked) by Bayer marked a breakthrough in the treatment of acute pain and was a boon to Bayer, until that is, their competitors found a way to copy the formula and create other versions of "Aspirin." So they were able to wring their profits after it was initially developed; now, it is a generic drug, one that anyone can produce, making it relatively cheap and easy to obtain, though for any major pharmaceutical company producing it, it provides only an insignificant fraction of their profit. Not to mention, aspirin has since been eclipsed by other painkillers, and only in the last two decades has had any major resurgence, due to its blood thinning qualities, helping heart patients avoid future heart attacks.

Re:It's not as if...

[bill_mcgonigle]

Yeah, it really sucked when the patent expired on Aspirin. Now nobody can buy one because businesses can't make money off it.

That misses the point of the article. If somebody wants to sell this to treat cancer, the FDA is going to require 800 million dollars worth of Phase I, II, and III clinical trials before it allows the claim.

Without the promise of patent protection, nobody is going to drop a billion dollars doing that.

Substitute your own number - if it's greater than the amount likely to be made selling a generic, there's no simple business case for it. There may be some PR business cases for it if the number is low enough.

Re:It's not as if...

[AdamKG]

Okay, so the FDA charges obscene amounts for clinical trials. How it that an argument for patents?

If the FDA's approval process for new drugs is broken - fix it. The last thing I would think of is to build yet another government-regulated, easily broken construct to pay for the first government-regulated, definitely broken construct.

Re:It's not as if...

[Abcd1234]

If somebody wants to sell this to treat cancer, the FDA is going to require 800 million dollars worth of Phase I, II, and III clinical trials before it allows the claim.

Not AFAIK. My understanding is that the FDA will fasttrack an already approved drug (such as this one) for alternative uses. Since safety is already proven, the only thing necessary is efficacy trials (so far as I know).

Fortunately, this makes it far more likely that a non-profit (or the government, who is obviously interested in lowering healthcare costs) could pick up the table to fund the research.

Re:It's not as if...

[bill_mcgonigle]

You're right - I, ummm, poorly skimmed the article. My bad.

[mumbles about Slashdot not having an edit button,....]

Re:It's not as if...

[jZnat]

How you would you feel if you suddenly stopped getting interest from your accounts just because your investment institution decided to give the money to a charitable cause?

Pretty good, actually.

Re:It's not as if...

[DragonWriter]

Okay, so the FDA charges obscene amounts for clinical trials.

No, the FDA just requires that people conducting clinical trials do lots of things to establish effectiveness and safety, which things are expensive. Its not like you have to cut an $800 million check to the FDA.

If the FDA's approval process for new drugs is broken - fix it.

Its not broken (well, given the dangerous treatments that get through it, perhaps it is, but not in being to rigorous in its requirements.)

The problem is, demonstrating safety and effectiveness of a drug is a complicated, expensive procedure, and cutting corners on it kills people dead (so, unfortunately, does doing it right, but less so.) It is intrinsically expensive.

Patents are a way of providing an incentive for private actors to go through the bother necessary to do that. The alternative is a public system of evaluation and testing of drugs at public expense, but designing a system to do that effectively is nontrivial, too.

Re:It's not as if...

[AdamKG]

It's nontrivial, yes, but the advantage is we only have to do it once, and the basis is already laid in the traditions of science (the scientific method, peer review, etc).

On the other hand, right now we have to have an FDA that performs its duty correctly (keep in mind that while the FDA does not do the testing themselves, they do have to know what is involved in this testing, well enough to make sure that the private actors carry out their tests adequately) and a USPTO that does so as well, and heck, neither one seems to be doing such a great job. The point has been made elsewhere in this discussion that the Government doesn't mess everything up, especially when they have scientists driving the process, such as Los Alamos, DARPA, or NASA in the USA, and the plethora of government-funded social services in most other developed Western nations. A transparent process that can be vetted by the public and the research community would be far better than what we have now.

Also, it's worth considering that while there is a private company running the tests, it is in their interests to falsify or otherwise skew both their testing and their patent applications. Thus, the government's current responsibilities are compounded (or in theory, can be compounded, by people who have every reason to do so) by the people they are supposed to be regulating. While letting this be a publicly funded certainly wouldn't remove all incentive for deception, it would remove one of the strongest- the profit motive.

This just in...

[susano_otter]

This just in: developing medecines takes work, and work costs resources. Anybody who can think of a better way to provide resources to the people interested in developing medecines, besides patent royalties and the like, please come forward.

And anybody who thinks that people should use their own resources to develop medecines, and then not ask for anything in return when they offer those medecines to the public, are kindly invited to drop whatever they're doing right now, that puts food on the table and a roof over their heads, and devote everything they have to developing medecines for free.

Re:This just in...

[susano_otter]

So if this medecine is so wonderful, and developing medecines for profit is so evil, why doesn't this University start mass-producing this medecine and giving it away for free?

Re:This just in...

[Billosaur]

This just in: developing medecines takes work, and work costs resources. Anybody who can think of a better way to provide resources to the people interested in developing medecines, besides patent royalties and the like, please come forward.

How about taking the money Big Pharma uses to line the pockets of its CEOs and the egregiously large profits these companies make and putting the bulk of it into research and production? How about diverting resources and money from male impotence drugs, since I suspect far more people have cancer than there are men who can't spank the monkey.

Re:This just in...

[Anonymous Coward]

This just in: developing medecines takes work, and work costs resources. Anybody who can think of a better way to provide resources to the people interested in developing medecines, besides patent royalties and the like, please come forward.

*stepping forward* how about regular semi-commodity business models - like the vast majority of actual products? no one has a patent on orange juice or paper towels, and somehow, there manage to be many companies which produce these products profitably.

Re:This just in...

[susano_otter]

Who are you to dicate how a free individual uses their resources, or how they spend the wealth their work produces for them?

If it's wrong to spend your time developing Viagra and selling it to misguided middle-aged salarymen, and we should take things away from such people and make them spend their time on cure for cancer instead, then what about you?

You're obviously intelligent and skilled, and yet you're probably not doing anything to help cure cancer, are you? So when can we expect to see you give up your job, quit posting to Slashdot in your leisure time, and join a cancer-cure R&D team at minimum wage? Anything less, and we'll find you guilty of exercising your freedom for your own benefit at the expense of your fellow man, and we'll force you to be a more productive and helpful member of society.

Re:This just in...

[Mr. Underbridge]

So if this medecine is so wonderful, and developing medecines for profit is so evil, why doesn't this University start mass-producing this medecine and giving it away for free?

For one, it would be illegal since the thing isn't FDA approved. And what does it take to get FDA approved, you ask? Years of studies and many millions of dollars. See many of the other posts on the topic, I'll not repeat them, but the basic point is that they'd have no hope of recouping their investment simply because tons of other companies would drive the price of the drug through the floor.

Re:This just in...

[matt21811]

"Anybody who can think of a better way to provide resources to the people interested in developing medecines, besides patent royalties and the like, please come forward."

You talk like there is no alternative to the patent system for encoruaging drug development. Countries with socialised health systems could have an economic incentive to develop this.

Re:This just in...

[Anonymous Coward]

Call it a hunch, but I believe it's because orange juice and paper towels aren't known for causing problematic side effects.

People take medicine on good faith that, while it should improve their current condition, it must not cause worse problems. But you can go back to taking tartar emetic.

Re:This just in...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's easy. The development sould be funded by the state governed health insurance funds. With more than one private funds a cooperation between them could be more difficult.

Re:This just in...

[susano_otter]

Yeah, but "recoup their investment" is evil for-profit big pharma thinking.

Surely the cure for cancer is worth more than the fiscal stability of a university, right?

Re:This just in...

[susano_otter]

It seems to me that if countries with socialized medicine programs truly cared about helping their people, they'd expend massive amounts of resources on R&D, beat the free market big pharma companies to the punch, secure the patents themselves, and distribute the drugs freely to their people.

It will be interesting to see how well Sweden, Canada, et al do in this scenario, where they don't even have to worry about free market competition.

Ten bucks says in ten year's time, free market big pharma will have figured out a way to profit from this discovery, while socialized medicine still hasn't invested enough resources in it to make a difference one way or the other.

Re:This just in...

[matt21811]

I'm glad you dont run the socialised medicine system in my coutry.
I think if they care about helping their people they will expend their money in areas where they get the most benefit for the least money.
You do realise that plenty of medical discoveries that are not patentable and are governement funded get used in these systems. Just off the top of my head, Vitamin K injections in newborn babies.

Re:This just in...

[Abcd1234]

For one, it would be illegal since the thing isn't FDA approved.

Umm... yes, it is. All that's required is efficacy studies.

Honestly, the least you could've done is RTFA.

Re:This just in...

[Anonymous Coward]

The drug we know as viagra was already created for something else. The anti-impotence was a side effect, and the drug did not work for its intended purpose. So the R&D money was already spent, and now that drug is one of the biggest money makers on the market. So the company turned flushing a whole lot of R&D dollars down the toilet into a rousing success. And those dollars they make on it do, to some extent, line the pockets of CEO's. That same CEO could be fired for continuing research on a drug that did nothing. Some of the money made from the risk SHOULD go to the person who took the risk, but far more of that money goes to additional R&D. Learn how the market works before criticizing it.

Re:This just in...

[Anonymous Coward]

You know all those $billions spent on the patent system? Give that to researchers.

Re:This just in...

[Anonymous Coward]

"It seems to me that if countries with socialized medicine programs truly cared about helping their people, they'd expend massive amounts of resources on R&D"

Many of these countries have significant cancer research programmes and contribute significantly to the knowledge of cancer, e.g. the
MRC in the UK, budget around $1 billion per annum on all areas, including cancer research.

There are also a number of not-for-profit and charity organisations devoted to such research, such as Cancer Research UK.

Re:This just in...

[Billosaur]

You're obviously intelligent and skilled, and yet you're probably not doing anything to help cure cancer, are you? So when can we expect to see you give up your job, quit posting to Slashdot in your leisure time, and join a cancer-cure R&D team at minimum wage? Anything less, and we'll find you guilty of exercising your freedom for your own benefit at the expense of your fellow man, and we'll force you to be a more productive and helpful member of society.

I'll gladly work for anyone who can put my computer and psychology skills to good use curing cancer, AIDS, poverty, etc. I'll even do it for free, in what little spare time I have. I don't pretend to be trying to cure anything, nor do I pretend to have the answers for all of society's ills. What I do know is that your typical CEO makes about 50,000 times more than most of the people who work for them, and if any of them were truly committed to the welfare of others, they'd put the money to work rather than spending it on luxury.

BTW, whenever this country has put its mind to something, it has accomplished it. What we need is a Manhattan Project to cure cancer, and one to fight AIDS, and one to end poverty world-wide. I'll gladly pony up my spare cash to fund these initiatives.

Re:This just in...

[Firethorn]

This just in: developing medecines takes work, and work costs resources. Anybody who can think of a better way to provide resources to the people interested in developing medecines, besides patent royalties and the like, please come forward.

First I'd like to note that I support the patent system in general, though I do recognize that it has problems. I remember that there's quite a bit of public research out there that's done solely for the 'public good', much university research falls into this.

Still, I had an idea once which I will call the 'public health fund'. Please note that it's very rough. Statistics will be kept on how many cases there are for various diseases. Each case will be assigned a level from 1 to 10. A 1 is simply an irritation, such as a cold. Strep throat would be a 3. Death would be a 10. Significant permanent treatment required would be like a 5, something permanently disabling would be an 6-9, as would ones requiring significant effort treatments such as cancer. Bedridden in a hospital would be a 9 for example.

Each disease would have an advocate board that studies and allocates the funds into appropriate measure, the board would be selected by the victims of the diseases or their next of kin.. The basic formula per person would be: level^4 dollars to be spent on researching and advancing cures, treatments, prevention, etc...

So cancer, with 553,400 deaths from it in 2001, would receive $5.5 Billion for research(from the deaths alone), though since cancer isn't actually a single disease I'd likely split that category up. It'd also gain quite a bit more money because the majority of people who die from cancer don't die in under a year, and many survive. So the researchers working on DCA goes before the appropriate cancer boards and point out the possiblities, possibly receiving a grant to further the research.

Type 1 diabetes affects about 1.5 Million Americans, which requires permament and intrusive treatment, more than just taking a pill. There are serious side effects, and it's more or less permament at this point, so it's a 5, resulting in $937.5 million a year in funding. Still, it'd get even more funding because diabetes is listed as a cause of death in nearly 225k cases a year.

Still, even the common cold would get some research money, though even with 15 million sufferers* getting it each year, it's not going to exceed level 1 or 2 in most cases, so it'll likely only get 30 million or so.

*Very rough figure, unable to quickly find a direct statistic.

Re:This just in...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh. Wait. So capitalism IS NOT about people with money lending to people without money so they can develop a product or service before said product or service can be immediately sold. Why do banks make so much money, then? I'm confused.

What are trade secrets again?

Oh, and market lead time?

Mindshare?

Marketing?

Also, am I the only person who wished there was more than one potato chip manufacturer? I suppose evil competition killed them all off.

Oh. I have an idea for a business. Sell water! Oh, but you can't patent water. That must be why nobody is selling it and why it's not the biggest growth sector for beverage companies.

Re:This just in...

[Mr. Underbridge]

Umm... yes, it is. All that's required is efficacy studies. Honestly, the least you could've done is RTFA.

Hey genius, how much does it cost to perform those efficicacy studies, clinical trials, safety studies, etc? The least you could have done is read my original fucking post.

Re:This just in...

[1ucius]

LOL. Universities are the biggest patent trolls out there, nowadays.

Re:This just in...

[Abcd1234]

Are you an idiot? This drug is already FDA approved. You don't need to perform safety studies.

Now let me repeat, so maybe you'll get it this time: *You don't need to perform safety studies*.

And it is in those studies that the bulk of the cost exists.

So all you need are efficacy studies, and those are cheap. Heck, a bunch of doctors could get together and perform them, if they wanted (though to get a large enough studies size would require a fair bit of labour... OTOH, finding test subjects should be easy enough). Of course, they'd just need a way to pay for the drugs and perform the follow-on data analysis, but the funds for that could be provided by government or charity.

Re:This just in...

[James McGuigan]

Its not so much the resources needed to develop the drug, but the work needed to prove to the FDA that the drug is safe (for everybody) and the legal liabilities that go without this proof, and then the resources to market this drug to all the doctors and/or public.

Re:This just in...

[susano_otter]

Why only your spare cash? Why wait for the government to initiate something?

And why single out "typical" CEOs? There's certainly a poverty-stricken, suffering demographic out there that's just as poor relative to you as you are to a typical CEO. Why do you insist on hoarding your time and money, and talking about what little you have to give to those who need more?

Both you and the typical CEO are both equally (and fabulously) wealthy by the standards of the world's poor. By what standard do you judge your own lifestyle to be reasonable, and the CEO's excessive? Is it just that his excess is so much greater than yours? But then where do you draw the line, between "reasonable excess" and "unreasonable excess"? And how do you explain your reasoning to sub-Saharan Africa?

Re:This just in...

[Billosaur]

And why single out "typical" CEOs? There's certainly a poverty-stricken, suffering demographic out there that's just as poor relative to you as you are to a typical CEO. Why do you insist on hoarding your time and money, and talking about what little you have to give to those who need more?

And why are you assuming I am so well off? Because I post on Slashdot? Because I work in it? Automatically I have money and time to spare? I have three children, a wife, a home, and a two-hour commute, and while I sympathize and empathize with all those in this world who are poor, I've been poor myself, and nobody came along and simply poured money on me and made my poverty go away.

And the point is not how much money I have to spare, which is virtually none after taking care of the necessities of survival for myself and my family, but the fact that there are those who incomes are so far above what is necessary to live a normal, simple life who do not seek to use their wealth to help others (e.g. Warren Buffet, Bill & Melinda Gates, etc.) but squander it on excess. If I do what I can, when I can, why shouldn't I expect others to do what they can? More to the point, simply because I have this expectation does not mean they have to do it. They have the right as free people to do what they wish, as long as what they do harms no one else. We're not talking law here, but morality, and the two are not synonymous.

I maintain that there are those in the pharmaceutical industry that could be doing more if they wanted to, and the resources are there if their business practices are altered. I'm not saying that we should force them to do it, only that they could if they wished. It's not my intent to tell people what they should be doing, but to ask if they could be doing more. That's the question we all can ask, even those of us teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Do not presume for a minute that your morality has any higher place in this world than mine -- in the end, one good asteroid could render both our points of view moot.

Re:This just in...

[susano_otter]

I'm not presuming my morality is better than yours. I'm pretty sure it isn't. What I'm trying to do is understand your morality.

For example, you have a home. I'm sure it's a nice home, but is it really a necessary home? And what about your wife? Can she not support herself? And why three kids? In a world of limited resources and starving children, what on earth possessed you to bring three more into the world, and then favor them at the expense of everybody else that could benefit from your charity?

Also, children are a choice--a luxury, in a sense. You chose to have some, most likely to gratify some personal desire, and now your resources are consumed by your choice of luxuries. Telling the world's poor that you don't have the resources to help them more because you chose to have children instead is functionally equivalent to telling the world's poor you can't help them because you chose to maintain a private helicopter instead.

I'm not convinced that your definition of a normal, simple life is truly "normal" and "simple" to the majority of the people in the world, who are long accustomed to getting by with much less than you seem to take for granted. How much more could you do for the world, if you really wanted to?

I maintain that just like those in the pharmaceutical industry, you could do more if you wanted, and the resources are there if your business practices are altered.

And I'm still not sure what part of your morality justifies the line you draw between your lifestyle and the lifestyle of a typical CEO.

Re:This just in...

[Billosaur]

I see now.

I have a home because it beats living on the streets. I have children (2 of whom are not mine by birth), because some day I will be unable to take care of myself. My wife and I both work and due to the times and our expenses, cannot make ends meet. I am verging on bankruptcy because I have been struggling for years to ensure that my family has a roof over its head, food in their bellies, and clothes on their back. If I had the resources of your average pharma CEO, I suspect I wouldn't be struggling so mightily. Mind you, my struggles are not because my home is luxurious and I am surrounded by fancy cars and expensive gadgets.

But apparently, no matter what my actual situation, it's easier for you to sit there and judge me, knowing very little of my life. I realize that response is hypocritical to some extent, given what I am saying about CEOs, but the lifestyles of CEOs are splashed all over business magazines, while my life, and the life of most working-class Americans, is kept in obscurity.

Survival, above all else comes first. If I do not survive, I cannot contribute anything to society. I must provide for myself and my family. Life would be so much easier and cheaper of course if we stopped procreating, but then human life on Earth would take on a tone of finality (I recommend seeing "Children of Men" if you want to know what a world without children would be really like) that would be hard to swallow. I procreate in order to ensure the survival of my species, the survival of my line, and to provide new life to take up the challenges left incomplete. I will never apologize or seek approval of the decisions I make, and will do what I must to ensure that everyone has a voice. In the end, each person must decide if they are doing enough on every level. It is a question that only the individual can ask and answer -- it is not for society at large to enforce.

Open Source It!

[Ranger]

Instead of running a dangerous open source meth lab people could run a highly profitable open source DCA lab.

waiting is the hardest part

[User 956]

Cancer Drug May Not Get A Chance Due to Lack of Patent

Yeah, well, if they continue to hold it up, it may not get a chance due to lack of patients.

Re:waiting is the hardest part

[Steeltoe]

Yeah, well, if they continue to hold it up, it may not get a chance due to lack of patients.

Uh, the medical companies are thriving on sickness, not health.

Instead of Health Care, it should be called Sickness & Death Care. Norwegians got it right: Sykehus - Sick Homes. Its just that people dont realize what theyre really going to..

Maybe then people would open their eyes and start caring for their body and mind through Yoga. The best medicine has always been prevention, care and happiness, and always will. Much of the pharmaceutical industry is really just a parasite.

Private enterprises won't develop the cure?

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

then public labs should. This is a matter of public health, therefore the state should fund the research. If only because, if this molecule has potential, the taxpayer money they put into the research will be peanuts compared to what health care providers will have to pay for licensed medicines. I.e., for the state, this is a matter of making long-term economies, not even a humanitarian pursuit. But of course, our dear leaders have to be willing to pay a miser upfront to avoid paying billions to pharmaceutical companies 10 or 20 years down the line.

I just don't understand this country anymore: have people completely forgotten we have (or should have) public labs to do the kind of research short-sighted profit-oriented companies won't do? apart for military technologies, it seems society has decided to put its future advances squarely and solely in the hands of the corporate world. This is sad.

Re:Private enterprises won't develop the cure?

[dpilot]

You seem to forge that this is Slashdot.

Remember, "public" means "government", and "government" is the stupidest there is, unable to do anything at all right. All such intelligence and acumen reside with "business". If only "government" would get out of the way with silly regulations, operating under the principles of the "free market", the profit motive would induce "business" to do the right thing, with the end result that we'd all be better off.

Silly things like effective medications that are inherently low-cost are an aberration, and don't really exist.

Re:Private enterprises won't develop the cure?

[Otter]

If only because, if this molecule has potential...

As with every "New Miracle Cure For Cancer!" story here (this is, what, the fourth one of the year and we're barely halfway through January), this is something that kills tumors in-vitro, published in a respectable but unremarkable journal and then hyped by an overexcitable univerity PR department. There are literally dozens of results like this every week, virtually all of which go nowhere.

As for the notion that the unwillingness to develop a drug in the absence of patent protection somehow is an argument against patents -- honestly, I can't get my brain down close enough to the level of such idiocy to reason with it.

Re:Private enterprises won't develop the cure?

[evilviper]

if this molecule has potential, the taxpayer money they put into the research will be peanuts compared to what health care providers will have to pay for licensed medicines.

Unless it turns out that it's not a viable treatment. Then they've spent millions upon millions of dollars, and get nothing out of it.

No problem, of course, since they can raise taxes to cover the loss.

Re:Private enterprises won't develop the cure?

[Abcd1234]

this is something that kills tumors in-vitro,

Actually, according to this more thorough article, the drug has also proven effective is mouse models.

Granted, this still isn't the same as a human trial, but it's a far cry from simply killing cancer in a petri dish.

As for the notion that the unwillingness to develop a drug in the absence of patent protection somehow is an argument against patents

Actually, it's more of an argument against privately funded drug development, as it's pretty clear that an unpatentable drug, no matter how effective, isn't useful to a company who's sole purpose is to make money.

Re:Private enterprises won't develop the cure?

[Otter]

Actually, less important than the animal result (although I appreciate the clarification) is that this is an approved, reasonably safe drug.

OK, so this is less inane than most of the "Cure For Cancer!" stories, albeit a long, long way from an approved cancer treatment. So, how does eliminating private drug development make trials of this any easier?

Re:Private enterprises won't develop the cure?

[maxwell demon]

Of course, if a company funds the research, and it turns out to be useless, then the customers of that company will pay it. Which in the case of drugs means the patients, and thus through health care providers again the public. Why do you consider that better?

Re:Private enterprises won't develop the cure?

[James_G]

But of course, our dear leaders have to be willing to pay a miser upfront to avoid paying billions to pharmaceutical companies 10 or 20 years down the line.

You seem to think the government represents the interests of the people. You're wrong. They represent the interests of giant pharmaceutical companies (among others). So, given the choice between paying a small amount up front, or taking taxpayer's money and giving it to their pharmaceutical buddies for 10-20 years, it's a total no-brainer.

You only have to look at the complete lack of regulation in the healthcare insurance industry which leads to anti-competitive, extortionate (and yet still government sanctioned) behaviour to realise that the system is set up to benefit the corporations, not the people. If you susbcribe to the concept of "trickle down" economics, then this makes sense. Of course, anyone with more than 3 functioning braincells realises that "trickle down" ecomomics is a load of steaming horse crap.

Re:Private enterprises won't develop the cure?

[Abcd1234]

So, how does eliminating private drug development make trials of this any easier?

No one said it did. The encouragement of private drug development to the exclusion of publically funded work (which is certainly the trend in the US... heck, universities can license their developments to private companies, even though they've been developed with public monies!) simply makes it (far) less likely that inexpensive or non-patented drugs will be developed and marketed, which means such treatments are unavailable to all but the affluent. And I don't know about you, but I find the idea of withholding medical treatment based on purchasing power to be morally offensive.

Further, the more cynical might suggest that privately own drug companies are more likely to research treatments over cures, since long-term drug dependence is more profitable... a view I subscribe to part-time. :)

Re:Private enterprises won't develop the cure?

[Colin Smith]

You seem to have forgotten about the Federal Drug Administration which is puts the multi million dollar barrier to entry in place. There is no free market.

Re:Private enterprises won't develop the cure?

[evilviper]

Of course, if a company funds the research, and it turns out to be useless, then the customers of that company will pay it.

No, as a matter of fact they won't.

Drugs are one of those products that are priced on what will be most profitable for the drug companies. Even if they take more losses that year, they can't just raise their prices, or they will end up losing money.

But more than that, companies have significant incentives not to waste money. Government has no such motivation, as history has shown. Too much spending will kill a company, while too much government spending will keep a segment of the government alive. And they can always get more money, since, unlike companies, there is no alternative to the government.

Re:Private enterprises won't develop the cure?

[yabos]

I think this just shows how despicable the drug companies really are. They aren't interested at all in curing any disease they just want to get you on some of their pills for life.

Re:Private enterprises won't develop the cure?

[fyoder]

The article is excessively pessimistic. While price per pill might not be high, cancer is epidemic. Whoever sells this stuff will sell tons of it. Will they have trouble at the research phase? Perhaps, but I doubt it. This is potentially huge, even at pennies per pill.

Re:Private enterprises won't develop the cure?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a matter of public health, therefore the state should fund the research.

You can claim that for any health issue. You can claim that for any issue in general. In fact, that's exactly the justification government has always used, and will always use for power grabs: It's a "public issue". What other justification is there?

Drug abuse is a public issue. Education is a public issue. Health care is a public issue. Housing is a public issue. Vulgarity is a public issue. The color of your house is a public issue. Social life is public issue. Your spending habits are a public issue. World empire is a public issue.

There's a reason why the US government of today dwarfs the US government of only 50, let alone 100 years ago, both in revenue and power over the people. There's a reason why every year, we are subject to thousands more laws than the year before. Can you guess why?

Why not "solve" all of "our" public issues with that special "right" to employ coercion which defines government? Welcome to totalitarianism.

There are other ways...

[haeger]

...to make money.

The "big" thing about the Losec medication wasn't really the drug itself, but the way it was delivered to the body iirc. And although AstraZeneca eventually 'lost' the patent (ok, it expired) on the active substance, a lot of other patents regarding the drug delivery were still in place, making them tons of cash.

So I do believe this is just a scare from the pro patent lobby. I'm sure there are a lot of companies working on this right now to see if it's possible to make a useful drug out of it. Even if the drug itself can't be patented there's probably a whole lot to be learned from it, possibly to be used in other drugs that can be patented.

I wouldn't worry. If it does cure cancer, we'll get the drug eventually.

.haeger

Obvious solution

[jfern]

Government funded research.

A lot of people on Slashdot may disagree with this, but the "free market" is not the solution to everything.

If it didn't cost billions to get FDA approval

[hsmith]

It wouldn't be an issue, now would it? Who is going to pony up the cash to get FDA approval to let others walk away with the approved drug?

Re:If it didn't cost billions to get FDA approval

[jo42]

It will get researched, developed and produced in another country. Americans will then fly or drive to this country to purchase and/or use this drug if the damn Yankees ban it.

Re:If it didn't cost billions to get FDA approval

[ADRA]

Who cares? If your system of government doesn't work to keep you alive, move to one that does! Whats more important your life or your patriation?

Not enough competition in drugs market

[Anonymous Coward]

Well if there's no need for drug companies to bring out new drugs, so much so that a potential cancer drug doesn't get studied, then there isn't enough competition in the market.

As a previous study pointed out, the drug companies have been kicking out minor variations of drugs and patenting minor increments without feeling the need to do anything major and that points to a lack of competition in the market, not a need for more patents.

DCA look like an interresting bugger(link inside)

[aepervius]

DCA

Look also at the following link in variosu treatment.

Please do not mod up at all. I assume everybody will look in google anyway. Hopefully

I did not find what I was searching : negative effect DL50 or DL90...

Go apply for a patent, then

[quiberon2]

If you think it's worth patenting, go apply for one. Just explain what your invention is, what was done before, and hand over the money.

In the US, a patent is rather like the title deeds to a house; someone might well lend you money on the security of it to develop the thing. Or maybe they won't, depending on what they are feeling like that day.

Get out your chemistry set

[Hoi Polloi]

According to the article dichloroacetate is relatively easy to obtain. "The compound, which is sold both as powder and as a liquid, is widely available at chemistry stores." I'm sure a pharmacist trained in the art of mixing compounds could formulate it to doctor's specs.

If worse comes to worse you raid your old "Super Advance Kiddee Chemistry Set" and dose yourself.

Re:Get out your chemistry set

[RobertB-DC]

If worse comes to worse you raid your old "Super Advance Kiddee Chemistry Set" and dose yourself.

For what it's worth, I suspect that "Chemistry Store" is Canadian for "Pharmacy". I know that in Britain, you go to the "chemist's" to get your prescription filled. Although it would be cool to be able to stroll down to the "chemistry store" and pick up a couple of ounces of, say, salt's better half.

Re:Get out your chemistry set

[ToreTS]

Although it would be cool to be able to stroll down to the "chemistry store" and pick up a couple of ounces of, say, salt's better half.

Why bother to walk to the "chemistry store" when you can buy it online?

OneWorld Health

[poincaraux]

Paging http://oneworldhealth.org/ ...

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

How about socialism?

[spun]

When the free market fails, as in this case, why not let government do it? Most major scientific breakthroughs have come from government funding.

Re:How about socialism?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would the market fail to provide this drug, IF IT WORKS?

Wouldn't you *pay* to get your cancer cured? I bet most people would, and if the cost producing it is not prohibitive, I fail to see why it wouldn't hit the market. After all, there's a profit selling that stuff to people who want it.

Just because you don't have a patent (i.e. mafia-enforced monopoly) on it doesn't mean it's not profitable for some magical reason.

Re:How about socialism?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

When the free market fails, as in this case, why not let government do it? Most major scientific breakthroughs have come from government funding.

A market in which the government enforces time limited monopolies in the form of patents can hardly be called a free market. I think what you mean to say is the heavily regulated and controlled market may or may not be failing in this instance and the government may want to step in and pick up the ball.

Re:How about socialism?

[susano_otter]

Since this breakthrough seems to have come from a university, and most U.S. universities receive government grants, I'm pretty sure that government funding played a part in it.

But given government's track record with responsible use of power, I'd much rather see government in a limited regulatory capacity (like the FAA) or stimulatory capacity (like NASA), putting reasonable bounds on private enterprise or encouraging technological advances in particular areas, than see government in an active manufacturing or commercial capacity.

But yeah, the government should contract this out and give it away... just as soon as they can convince their constituents it's worth the tax increase.

After all, somebody has to get paid to do the work, and that paycheck has to come from somewhere. If the market can't convince people to pay for it, then the government either has to convince people to pay taxes for it, or else conclude that people don't really want it all that much after all.

Re:How about socialism?

[spun]

The market would have failed far earlier without regulation. The free market system breaks down in the face of externalities, imbalanceof information, or natural monopoly. In this case, the issues are externalities and imbalance of information. The externalities are the potential harms caused by poorly tested drugs, and the imbalance of information is due to the fact that no average buyer will have nearly enough information to make an informed decision about what drug to take. Thus the need for government regulation.

Re:How about socialism?

[OldeTimeGeek]

Because no elected government in its right mind would take it on.

Let's say that the US government decided that it was in society's best interest to develop this drug. After a couple of billion dollars of development and testing (they would still have to go through the FDA, right?), the drug turns out to have some fairly severe side effects and can't be sold. Now the original sponsors have to explain where the money went and why they decided spend the money in the first place. The next vote would be fun.

Or, let's say that the trials went well and the drug eventually made it to cancer patients - and turned out to be another Thalidomide. The lawsuits would last for decades and anybody who voted for it would be labeled as a killer - or worse.

Even if it does work, there will still be questions about why government decided to compete with private industry. Don't you think that the pharmaceutical companies based outside of the US would be very interested in why the US government decided to compete with them? In the best of circumstances, it's a no-win situation for everybody. Except, of course, for the cancer patient - but nobody really cares about them, anyway.

It's far easier politically to do nothing and complain about the rapacious pharmaceutical companies.

Re:How about socialism?

[Qzukk]

IF IT WORKS?

Who's going to pay people to find out if it works or not?

Just because you don't have a patent

Correction, who's going to pay people to find out if it works or not, only to have all the other drug companies start selling the drug once you've proven that it works?

Re:How about socialism?

[Vainglorious Coward]

The University of Alberta is not in the US.

Re:How about socialism?

[spun]

I never meant the government should manufacture it, but if it works, the government should foot the bill for testing it in this new capacity, and if this further testing shows the drug is promising, then license it to whichever American company wants to produce it.

Re:How about socialism?

[spun]

This is an existing drug that has been used for other purposes for years. We know there are no major side effects. It isn't another thalidomide. We just need to know if it works against cancer. But it is such an old drug, it is no longer patented, so no one can make obscene amounts of money off of it. The US wouldn't be producing the drug, just paying for the research.

Re:How about socialism?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

The market would have failed far earlier without regulation.

That depends entirely upon what you mean by "failed."

The free market system breaks down in the face of externalities, imbalanceof information, or natural monopoly. In this case, the issues are externalities and imbalance of information. The externalities are the potential harms caused by poorly tested drugs...

Poorly tested drugs can be solved by the market as companies lose business as their reputation is destroyed by dangerous drugs and as independent testing and validation companies come into existence. I disagree with your point in this case.

...and the imbalance of information is due to the fact that no average buyer will have nearly enough information to make an informed decision about what drug to take.

Providing information and testing is a socialist program, but it is not the interruption of the free market we were discussing, which is the banning of drugs based upon government tests and the government enforcement of patents that stop other companies from making the same drugs and providing competition. It is the job of doctors in conjunction with the info from the FDA or a more free market replacement for the FDA to provide buyers with information. That is why we pay doctors, to be experts on that subject.

Thus the need for government regulation.

You're completely missing the point. The FDA or some other body providing information is needed. That is not the same as regulation. I'm all in favor of the FDA telling me drug X is dangerous and likely to kill me. I'm not in favor of them taking away my freedom to choose to take it anyway because I disagree with them. That said, it was the patent system that was the restriction of the free market to which I was referring. Our patent system is quite broken, but I'm not advocating doing away with it, only doing away with referring to any market in which the government enforces patents as a "free market" which it patently is not.

Re:How about socialism?

[AK Marc]

When the free market fails, as in this case, why not let government do it?

The free market didn't fail. There was a study into a drug being used for something other than its original purpose. The results of the study are in. It has not gotten to the point where it is ready for market. The summary reads like there is a drug ready for use, but people are dying because the manufacturers refuse to produce it. That is simply not true.

As for the reason to not have government do it, there is no reason. There are manufacturing companies that will gladly make it, and in fact, it is a drug that is currently available and being manufactured (just not labeled for the treatment described). So, why should we need the government to step in and make something already made by someone else? I guess we should get them to make asprin now too, since someone said that it's good for the heart, and no one is taking up getting it approved by the FDA as a prescription drug for treating high blood pressure.

And no, this isn't a stab at you, but that Slashdot is purposefully posting the most misleading and useless summaries and titles. The *only* story is that there is a new cancer drug in the pipe, no different than every other week.

Re:How about socialism?

[spun]

Well put. We need information, not regulation. But without regulation, we must also have a fair and equitable justice system, to catch the inevitable errors that slip through the cracks. Doctors can be bribed. People can be lied to. Drugs can be advertised as pure when they aren't, and side effects blamed on anyone or anything else.

The free market never seems to work quite right where survival issues such as food, water, shelter or health are involved. Perhaps the idea that people will act in their rational self interest does not apply very well to irrationally emotional issues relating to survival.

Re:How about socialism?

[susano_otter]

Oops!

In that case, I'd still wager that government funding has played a part in this breakthrough.

And I stand by the rest of the post to which you replied.

Thanks for the correction, though!

Re:How about socialism?

[spun]

I never meant the government should make it. Only that without the monopoly granted by patent, there is no way for a company to recoup the cost of testing a drug for a new application. Therefore the government should subsidize the testing of potentially useful but unprofitable drugs such as this.

Re:How about socialism?

[Qzukk]

What's needed is the creation of some kind of drug testing organization that would be responsible for the actual process of certification of drugs, rather than an organization like the FDA whose sole purpose is to tell people what to do via regulation. This organization would operate a structured framework that would accept drugs and their target conditions, and guide each drug along the multi-step process with standardized and reliable testing processes for each step of the way to assure patients that the drugs are effective and as safe as possible.

One independent organization that was free of corporate and political interference would significantly improve the process of drug invention. Further, with an organization independent of payment from the company there would be no direct pressure to hide results or approve things to make the money flow in (see: patent office or the redacted Vioxx study that had deleted the report of cardiovascular events). I'll leave it up to economists to explain how to get such an organization created, since it would almost certainly fail under either a socialist (government interference) or a capitalist (corporate interference) economy.

Re:How about socialism?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or more accurately, when the US Pharmaceutical companies aren't interested in curing cancer because of profit margins, and the Canadian students think they have a way to do it - let the Canadian government cure cancer - the US Pharmaceutical companies can then step in later to hijack it for profit and that means that US taxpayers get their cancer cured without raising their taxes - everyone wins! Except the Canadians... but they're too busy saving the world to realize the rest of the world is busy ripping them off.

Re:How about socialism?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most major scientific breakthroughs have come from government funding

Like lightbulbs? Or electric generators? Or cars? Blast furnaces? Skyscrapers? Refrigeration? Television? Maybe all of these wasted corporate R&D dollars should have been taxed so the government could have bought us another bridge to an uninhabited island in Alaska...

Re:How about socialism?

[mark-t]

What does the US government have to do with this? The University of Alberta is not in the US.

Re:How about socialism?

[Eivind Eklund]

Providing information and testing is a socialist program, It may be an interruption of the free market, yet it is a move towards the perfect market, as a perfect market assume there's complete information on the hand of all participants. And it is a basic model much of the thinking around markets is based on. Personally, I find reasonable labelling requirements the single best intervention there is - get good information to the people affected. I suspect we could probably even replace much of the testing requirements for drugs with better labelleing for untested drugs, and let people (or possibly their doctors) decide if they want to pay for the tested stuff.

Eivind.

Re:How about socialism?

[Anonymous Coward]

So what? It's still profitable, plus YOU have the experience with the drug, you are the first to advertise it (first-mover advantage), you have the reputation of being a good research company (innovative), and you can likely produce it cheaper because of the experience gained.

And EVEN if not: if it's profitable, why not just develop it? Or make an alliance with other big companies: share costs, share profits. That's better for *everybody* involved than not making any profits, because a drug is not developed at all.

It's a bit like the prisoner's dilemma, only that you have *contracts*, i.e. you can be sure that both costs and profits are shared, once everybody signed up to the joint-venture. By the way, in many technological areas, big companies do JUST THAT to split the (high) risk, even while there is a lack of global patent systems.

Better, more informative article

[Anonymous Coward]

here

-mcgrew (my computer is broken):

What about generics?

[Anonymous Coward]

If the main pharmacutical companies aren't interested in it because they can't lock in a monopoly and rape the public for billions of dollars, what's to stop the generic drug manufacturers from pursuing it? Since the majority of a drug's cost isn't in the R&D, rather in the marketing, you would think that for a reasonably inexpensive research cost some generic drug manufacturer can really emerge as a white knight if this drug is as effective as the researchers are hoping it will be. There won't be any need for huge marketing costs - the free advertising from a story like this is more than enough to get noticed... and if it is a successful product it will be known by oncologists world wide. There's still money to be made and they don't even have to be "evil" to do it.

Re:What about generics?

[cashman73]

Not true. Any company that wants to bring this to market, even a generic manufacturer, still has to pay the costs of the clinical trial steps. This is part of your R&D costs, and quite an expensive cost as well. Yes, marketing costs are still astronomical (and probably don't have to be, either), but then again, just because something receives lots of exposure in the mainstream media doesn't mean that doctors are paying attention to that. Although if they're patients start asking about a particular drug, they'll do the research and find out if it's good, but doctors don't research these things in the mainstream media; they have much better sources to find out all of the unbiased details and results.

Re:What about generics?

[jackelfish]

I am not sure why people tend to label big pharma as "evil" they provide a service and people pay for it. Everyone has to make a living and drug companies will supply what the market can support. If that means that you pay $600 a pill for a new cancer treatment that will let you live another month, then, bankrupting your family aside, that is your choice. Of course, there are always exceptions to the rules and that is a discussion best left to people smarter than myself.

Re:What about generics?

[maxwell demon]

But couldn't companies just share those costs? Indeed, maybe this model should get institutionalized, so that we can get away with those drug patents at all. Instead, if you want to manufacture drugs, you must be member in an organization which uses the member fees to do drug research. The results are then open to all drug manufacturers. If done right, this gives a level playing field for all drug companies, resulting in a truely free drug market.

Re:What about generics?

[cashman73]

That sounds sorta like Communism, eh?

Re:What about generics?

[maxwell demon]

No. Where in communism could you produce and sell drugs on a free market, after they have been developed?

Also, if set up correctly, that organization would effectively be controlled by the member companies. If that's communism, then every entity with more than one person is.

Who needs patents

[Anonymous Coward]

Forget this "intellectual property" nonsense. The researchers should just sell T-shirts and do live shows to make money. That's how most... Oh, wait-

maybe on track

[objwiz]

I wonder if the speculation may be more on target than credit is given. If a drug or chemial or w/e doesn't have patent, then the price of it is open to stiff competition since anyone can bring it to market. That means lower margins. Not necessarily a bad thing, until one starts to consider lawsuits. Drug companies get a lot of attention from the lawyers. Since the prospect of lawsuits is high, and the prospect of profit is low, there is not much incentive, imo, to market it. Why risk losing $ over it?

Not sure what the big deal is?

[jackelfish]

When I checked, Dichloroacetic acid was not a controlled substance of any kind. Therefore if you have cancer and want to give it a whirl, you can just go onto the Sigma-Aldrich website, give them your credit card number and order a bottle. I am sure if it works as well as the researchers believe it does we will have plenty of anecdotal evidence for its usefulness in no time. Also, if it does work, then there is always the public funding sources that also fund actual clinical trials. All drugs do not have to come through Pharma. Soon someone will decide that there is enough money out there to make it worthwhile putting it in a caplet and selling it along side the vitamin C.

Re:Not sure what the big deal is?

[fafalone]

Individuals cannot place online orders with Sigma-Aldrich. Only companies can, and you have to fax them lots of forms to prove you're a business. For any chemical, not just controlled substances. You might still be able to place an order over the phone, but I've found its easier to just look for a smaller chemical company.
Sorry, I just couldn't resist an opportunity to be technically correct, the best kind of correct.

Re:Not sure what the big deal is?

[evilviper]

Therefore if you have cancer and want to give it a whirl, you can just go onto the Sigma-Aldrich website, give them your credit card number and order a bottle.

Yeah, and when you have an infection, you can just eat some moldy bread too...

Pharmaceuticals drugs aren't just the active ingredient. If they were, we'd just eat pieces of willow tree bark for headaches, instead of taking aspirin.

Re:Not sure what the big deal is?

[jackelfish]

In this case, I believe that it is just the active ingredient. However, I agree with you that much more work will need to be done on the pharmacokinetics side of things. Also, there are apparently quite a few people out there who still chew on willow bark to relieve their headaches.

Re:Not sure what the big deal is?

[zombie_striptease]

Pfft, you don't chew willowbark, you make it into a tea. And the only reason eating moldy bread won't necessarily cure your infection is because mold != penicillin, but you probably know that and were just being facetious. I'll concede that sometimes the inactive ingredients of a pill affect how it's delivered to the system, most often in terms of longer time-release dosages, but I'm not sure why you're taking such snark with the concept of people self-medicating (and with substances that aren't in their blister-packaged mass manufactured forms!). It happens all the time, and with the exception of a handful of idiots, most people manage to not kill themselves.

"New use" patent?

[Stile 65]

Since the drug is not currently being used to treat cancer, can't the use of it to treat cancer be patented? This is a way that drug companies often keep a monopoly on at least part of a drug's utility, IIRC.

Re:"New use" patent?

[Stile 65]

From the way it looks, the compound has been known for quite a while, and it hasn't been obvious until just now that it could treat cancer...

That said, I would much rather NOT have it patented, and have the clinical trials supported by charity or government, because the world needs a cheap, effective cancer drug.

Ah man!

[Anonymous Coward]

If there is obvious promise in this (which there's have to be to get a pharmaceutical company to invest loads of cash) some organization, or college, or government grant will help pay for the studies.

You're funny! After critizing the submission for being speculation (which it is), you then indulge in speculation yourself.

Sure, but whom?

[EmbeddedJanitor]

If it is not patented, then it can be copied and sold by the non-developing company without royalties. Developing company would rather develop drugs that they can patent and make a stinking profit with.

Re:Sure, but whom?

[Anonymous Coward]

If software can be patented, why can't drugs be copyrighted? Or can we expect patents to protect things like films...

Easy solution

[Snarfangel]

1. Find a plant, animal, or mineral with it.
2. Market it as a natural supplement.
3. Profit! /yes, I found the mysterious step 2.

Time to Step Up

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a perfect case for Socialized Medicine to step up. Will The national health systems of socialized countries pay for the research needed to make this work? Or will they whine and complane that the evil American drug companies won't do it for them.

May not matter.

[Irvu]

Even if the companies do turn it down they will get a further crack at it. Courtesy of the Byah-Dole act most publicly funded research (especially drug research) in the U.S. can later be "bought" by private companies who may then claim "intellectual property" on the fruits of the public's labors. It is this law that allows both AZT and Viagra (developed with funding from the National Institutes of Health) to be considered "private" property and for the companies to charge the people who invested in their development for their use.

The practical upshot of this is that if the drug does go to the universities to be developed it would be following the normal track of most medical research. And if any patentability (say on dosage levels) does show up the companies can always buy it then.

Re:May not matter.

[drinkypoo]

Courtesy of the Byah-Dole act most publicly funded research (especially drug research) in the U.S. can later be "bought" by private companies who may then claim "intellectual property" on the fruits of the public's labors.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. If we reduced the duration of patent protection it would be an entirely reasonable way to recoup the costs of research, and to bring drugs (and other things) into mass production to benefit the public.

Or you know, we can just wait until Brazil makes generics of the drugs, laws be damned, and we can take a vacation trip there for treatment.

Re:May not matter.

[jbeaupre]

If it can't be patented or produced under trade secret, then they can't later buy it from a university and claim "intellectual property." No one can. Doesn't matter if a university develops it further, broad patent protection won't be possible. Maybe some narrow protection on some improvement, formulation, etc. But the more this researcher talks about it, the less likely that becomes.

Re:May not matter.

[Irvu]

The problem really is that *we* don't recoup the costs of research. Its not as if the Drug companies give back the money to the funding agency. It typically goes to the university or the individual researchers. Many of the drugs purchased do not make their way out into the mainstream as claimed but rather are kept hidden. AZT for example was purchased and sat on for quite some time until after the AIDS Epidemic had started to rise and the drug became more profitable.

Moreover much of our public health costs and private health costs are spent paying the market rate of these drugs. When you think about the amount of dollars on AIDS treatment that is going to a company that didn't spend a dime to make the drugs it becomes a vicious cycle. First our taxes are used to invent them. Then our taxes and out private monies are used to pay a mint for them and the only winners are the drug companies.

Re:May not matter.

[drinkypoo]

The problem really is that *we* don't recoup the costs of research. Its not as if the Drug companies give back the money to the funding agency. It typically goes to the university or the individual researchers.

I don't have a problem with the funding going to the University, although I do have a problem with it going to the individual researchers. If they want that money, they can go work for the drug companies. No reason they should get the benefits of both worlds.

Many of the drugs purchased do not make their way out into the mainstream as claimed but rather are kept hidden. AZT for example was purchased and sat on for quite some time until after the AIDS Epidemic had started to rise and the drug became more profitable.

Reducing the duration of patents would solve this particular problem. There would be motivation to get the drug on the market quickly and make one's profits. If the durations were decreased, then drug profits would be decreased, which means that the drug companies would have even more motivation to produce more medications in the hope of getting a major hit.

Moreover much of our public health costs and private health costs are spent paying the market rate of these drugs. When you think about the amount of dollars on AIDS treatment that is going to a company that didn't spend a dime to make the drugs it becomes a vicious cycle. First our taxes are used to invent them. Then our taxes and out private monies are used to pay a mint for them and the only winners are the drug companies.

Yes, well, the system is broken as designed, at least in terms of helping people. Unfortunately that's what you get with a capitalistic society that permits campaign contributions and the like. Once organizations realize that they can buy legislation, it's all over.

Re:May not matter.

[Anonymous Coward]

Courtesy of the Byah-Dole act most publicly funded research (especially drug research) in the U.S. can later be "bought" by private companies who may then claim "intellectual property" on the fruits of the public's labors.

Interesting, but irrelevant in this case, since the University of Alberta isn't in the US.

Re:May not matter.

[Abcd1234]

Even if the companies do turn it down they will get a further crack at it. Courtesy of the Byah-Dole act most publicly funded research (especially drug research) in the U.S. can later be "bought" by private companies who may then claim "intellectual property" on the fruits of the public's labors.

Except that the pioneering work was done in Canada.

Moreover, there is no IP here... the drug is simply not patentable (AFAIK). The only options are patenting delivering mechanisms ('course, it can apparently be administered orally, so there doesn't appear to be any options along those lines) or derivative drugs (admittedly there may be options, here).

The more interesting thing is that the mitochondria appear to be a viable target for cancer therapy drugs. If anything, this discovery may spur work into developing other drugs/therapies.

Re:May not matter.

[Anonymous Coward]

Besides, all pharm. Co's know that curing diseases is NOT how you stay in business. Maintenance medication is the status quo in todays healthcare industry. Why would ANY business kill off the hand that is feeding it?

/on maintenance meds
//tired of it
///looking for natural alternatives

Re:May not matter.

[norton_I]

I don't have a problem with the funding going to the University, although I do have a problem with it going to the individual researchers. If they want that money, they can go work for the drug companies. No reason they should get the benefits of both worlds.

Actually, researchers for drug companies are unlikely to make money off of their inventions. That is one advantage universities offer to compensate for the dramatically lower base salaries -- if you invent something that makes a ton of money you get usually between 1/3 and 1/2 of the royalties (split among the inventors) after the university recoups patenting costs.

Also, many academics instead leave the unviersity after inventing something and start a company that licenses the technology from the university.

It is a pretty good system. While it wouldn't be a bad idea to also include repayment of development grants in some cases, I think we get a reasonable benefit from the system as it stands. I would be more supportive of requiring (or enforcing existing requirements where they exist) the results of government funded research to be licensed "fairly", especially in cases when the developer isn't commercializing them.

Re:May not matter.

[drooling-dog]

And if any patentability (say on dosage levels) does show up the companies can always buy it then.

Maybe they can patent the sale of it when specifically labelled for treating cancer, but the chemical itself is cheap and has been around for a long time. In fact, my Merck Index (which I just happen to have in front of me here) lists one of its uses as a "topical astringent", and says it's also been used to treat lactic acidosis. Can it be prescribed off-label?

It'll be tough to force cancer patients to mortgage their houses for a few grams of this stuff when it's already being sold for other uses at a few dollars per kilogram!

Re:May not matter.

[Anonymous Coward]

/on maintenance meds //tired of it ///looking for natural alternatives

I prescribe buckshot applied with a 12 guage shotgun taken orally per diem, or as long as cancer survives.

Re:May not matter.

[Anonymous Coward]

Good thing it's researched in Canada

Re:May not matter.

[Irvu]

However if subsequent work is done in the U.S. then that work, i.e. variants of the drug or dosage levels would come under Byah-Dole.

Re:May not matter.

[Irvu]

The downside is that the more any given university gets obsessed with IP Payoffs (especially those covered by time-limited protections like patents) the less that they engage in any of the basic research that is necessary for long-term improvements. The pattern has long been the bane of most publicly traded companies and is now becoming the bane of some IP-obsessed universities. Large amounts of local search (i.e. variants of existing things that make money) stifles the far search (i.e. basic theories of molecular structure) that are needed down the road. Indeed the patent beuraucracy of a university can become so stifling that it stands in the way of actual research.

Moreover, a recent study out of California showed that when researchers have a stake in the profits of a development they are more likely to "fudge" the data or at least seek sunner characterizations which you absolutely cannot have if you want safe medicines.

Re:May not matter.

[Irvu]

You'd be surprised what can happen when drug companies and patents come to town. Suppose for example the delivery agent is patented or the prescriptuion levels (it has been done with AZT). Then even though the "drug" itself is cheap the medicine made from it is not. IP again to the rescue. Keep in mind that IP has been leveraged on crops that grow in the wild. Wheat and Soy that goes for a few cents per bushel in other parts of the world just happens to be patented under U.S. las by the companies that "discovered" them.

Re:May not matter.

[FallLine]

Reducing the duration of patents would solve this particular problem. There would be motivation to get the drug on the market quickly and make one's profits. If the durations were decreased, then drug profits would be decreased, which means that the drug companies would have even more motivation to produce more medications in the hope of getting a major hit.

This is a total non-sequitur.

First, drug companies have a huge incentive to rush a drug to market once they believe it is safe and effective. They've invested hundreds of millions of dollars -- they're not going to delay their ability to reap the profits unnecessarily. Even if you assume it wouldn't impact their patent life on market, the shareholders and management are highly motivated to make it happen ASAP.

Second, the patent duration is relatively fixed in practice and they maximize their time on market with patent protection by getting it there more quickly. The absolute most they can gain is 5 years for the testing and regulatory review process, but no more than 14 years post-approval, and the FDA reduces time spent in testing (non-agency review) by half. So if they drag a clinical trial out for 2 years longer than necessary, they'd lose 1 year effectively. Most drugs have less 10 years on market before the patent expires.

Third, drug companies can't make "too much" money for shareholders. They want to maximize their investment. If they've identified a drug that might worthwhile, they're going to patent it ASAP to prevent their competitors from beating them to the punch. Once they've done that the clock starts counting against them and they would be stupid to sit around on something that they have good cause to believe would work.

maybe on track-????$$$$

[Anonymous Coward]

This is were the open source community comes in. With a proven track record going back decades, of funding good ideas in an alturistic manner. This drug will soon be on the market, free to all individuals, countries, and even space aliens.*

*small print. may cause blindness, hearing loss, and shrinkage of testes

Shareholder Responsibilities

[Anonymous Coward]

These companies have only shareholder responsibilities. That's it.

Re:Shareholder Responsibilities

[Anonymous Coward]

Something has gone terribly wrong if they feel they have no responsibility to the public. In the US the public is supposed to be the government more or less, and corporations are creatures of government decree. There is nothing magical about a corporation, it's governed by laws, and yes, virginia, the government still has the power to take away a corporate charter.

Horsefeathers ...

[Anonymous Coward]

This crap is poison : http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/docs/1998/Suppl-4/989-994 stacpoole/abstract.html and causes cancer.

Yeah. It kills cancer ... and your neurons : http://rarediseases.about.com/b/a/257426.htm

I wouldn't fund research on this either.

Re:Horsefeathers ...

[Jerry Rivers]

Maybe you should read your own references. To wit:

"However, concern about DCA toxicity is predicated mainly on data obtained in inbred rodent strains administered DCA at doses thousands of times higher than those to which humans are usually exposed."

And

"As a medicinal, DCA is generally well tolerated and stimulates the activity of the mitochondrial pyruvate dehydrogenase enzyme complex, resulting in increased oxidation of glucose and lactate and an amelioration of lactic acidosis."

As for your other "source" (if one can call About.com a reliable source), the last sentence is telling: "The findings show that this side effect of DCA outweighs any potential beneficial effect of the medication in treating MELAS." In other words, DCA isn't good for people with the exceedingly rare MELAS SYNDROME.

A surprise to ANYONE? Blame government/attorneys

[JonTurner]

Of COURSE no pharma company would spend tens of millions (or more) to conduct clinical trials on a drug they couldn't sell! It's a simple fact of business -- even in the extraordinarily small chance that the drug proves 1) effective and 2) safe, it would have to be sold in sufficient quantity to return a profit. Otherwise, it's a guaranteed loss.

For all those who see something wrong in this (and I'm talking to the Big Pharama Conspiracy crowd here... the same bunch who believes in the 200MPG carburettor stories), perhaps you'd like to cough up some money out of your personal budget to cover the costs and risks of conducting these trials and persuing FDA approval. If all goes well, you could then give away the results for the betterment of mankind. But talk is cheap.

And don't even get me started on liability issues. Just ask John Edwards (former Vice Presidential candidate) how much money is to be had by suing drug companies. There are legions of attorneys standing by waiting to pounce on any perceived harm, no matter how obscure or rare.

Both of these costs discourage drug development such as this one, and force "Big Pharma" to be especially risk adverse.

Blame government and attorneys.

Interesting Take

[localman]

I've been down on the current patent situation for a while, but for some reason I'd not looked at it from this angle before. I always figured the biggest problem was that useful inventions were getting locked up for too long by patenting them. But in this case the patents are discouraging valid solutions because the patented options are more profitable. I suppose that this was obvious to some, but I think it's interesting in a subtle way: not only do patents lock up useful creations, they also lock out useful creations. They create a false market for novelty.

All this is assuming that the claims in the story are legit, but it's a worthwhile angle to consider nonetheless.

Cheers.

I wish people would think for 10 minutes

[geekoid]

about what they are about to submit to slashdot.

1) Even though it is not patent, drug companies would still make million and millions of dollars. Yes they would all be compteting, but even then they would still make millions and millions of dollars.

2) There is no reason that they wouldn't start some sort of group development project, then split the profits.

3) There are companies in other countries who could do this.

Of course, all the deals with reality and not with spouting some personal and illogical point about patents.

Human Race = Sold Out

[Quzak]

Again we are shown that the Human Race has been sold out. Because we all know that PROFIT is > then all. One day it will cause our extinction.

A race couldnt save itself from its demons because a profit couldnt be turned in the process.

Cure vs. Treatment

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to realize that no company in the business wants a cure, just treatments. There is no profit in cures. If you bring these companies a cure for anything they'll try to kick it under the table so it's never heard from again. Bring them a treatment and amazing things happen. You just have to love how the current western doctor is a legalized drug pusher for all these companies.

Re:Cure vs. Treatment

[HTH NE1]

"Just last year, my scientists cultivated bacteria from the Russian crater and do you know what we found? The cure for the common cold. Kept it strictly within the laboratory, of course. No need to get people excited. Why sell one cure when I can sell a thousand palliatives?" -- Henry Van Statten, Doctor Who "Dalek"

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Not in the "West"

[NMerriam]

Cuba has a large, thriving and internationally recognized cutting-edge pharmaceutical and biomedical research industry. They specialize in developing and distributing drugs to the 99% of planet Earth that can't afford $5/day to get harder erections. They generally research based on the commonality and severity of particular diseases, and then try to find exceptionally low-cost ways to solve them better. Ironically enough, it's quite profitable since selling tens of millions of pills to entire continents at 1% profit can add up pretty quickly.

Re:Not in the "West"

[jeremycobert]

too bad the Cuban shipping and delivery system is fleet of 1963 ford fairlanes. the words Cuba and cutting edge just don't go together.

Re:Not in the "West"

[Jherek Carnelian]

the words Cuba and cutting edge just don't go together.

Only if you've been brainwashed by western propaganda.

Re:Not in the "West"

[k4_pacific]

Yes, it will probably be Cuba that develops this first. I for one welcome our cancer-resistant, Communist overlords.

Re:Not in the "West"

[Abcd1234]

Quiet, you dirty pinko commie! Quit trying to steal my freedom!!!

Re:Not in the "West"

[Reality Master 101]

Only if you've been brainwashed by western propaganda.

I suppose the travel restrictions not allowing cuban citizens to leave their Paradise is also Western propaganda?

Maybe it's just that no citizen wants to visit other places. And the citizens probably like having one leader for, like, 100 years straight.

Re:Not in the "West"

[RonBurk]

And yet, there is the disturbing case of policosanol (just buy some Cuban sugar cane to make it!). Policosanol has the disturbing property that it seems to treat high cholesterol when tested by Cuban-funded studies, but not when tested with non-Cuban dollars.

Also disturbing is the fact that the Cubans discovered a new use for policosanol (increasing BMD for post-menopausal women) at just about exactly the time the cholesterol claim was being shot down by a large study.

Let's not all sign up for the Cuban model of drug development just yet.

In America, in Europe, in Cuba, and (I bet) in Timbuktu, one unfortunately always has to ask "who profits" when evaluating the claims made for any given drug.

Re:Not in the "West"

[Jherek Carnelian]

Why are you posting red herrings?

How about actually disputing that Cuba does indeed conduct cutting edge biotech development?

Or are you just determined to prove my point about brain-washing by your own example?

Re:Not in the "West"

[Reality Master 101]

Why are you posting red herrings?

Of course a Communist country can spend huge amounts of money on anything it wants in order to be "leading" at something (e.g., the Soviet Union and the arts, atomic weapons and rockets). So what? I'm responding specifically to your use of the phrase "western propoganda", which is normally a code phrase that means you think Cuba is some misunderstood wonderful political system, if only the West would open its eyes.

Or are you just determined to prove my point about brain-washing by your own example?

I'm not even sure what your point is. If you think my points prove "brain-washing", then you must think my points aren't a fair representation of Cuba.

Re:Not in the "West"

[khallow]

Why are you just mentioning Cuba? Surely there are a dozen or more countries with similar capability and ambitions. And China and India would vastly overshadow Cuba's medical industry. Or is this a joke like the "In Soviet Russia" jokes?

Re:Not in the "West"

[Frozen Void]

That pitiful industry is no match for Glorious Undefeatable Democratic People Republic of Korea medicine industry.Their human medicine trials are the most extensive in the world.

Re:Not in the "West"

[Jherek Carnelian]

I'm responding specifically to your use of the phrase "western propoganda", which is normally a code phrase that means you think Cuba is some misunderstood wonderful political system, if only the West would open its eyes.

So you made up a strawman and then tore it down wasting all of our time, how special.
Don't even pretend that saying "normally a code phrase" makes it so.

The problem is the cost of getting FDA approval

[Anonymous Coward]

The cost of getting a new drug to market has nothing to do with the development of the drug. It's mostly the cost of getting FDA approval.

The FDA has absolutely no incentive to make the approval process cost-effective, because the assumption is that the costs will be paid by some big pharma company that will make a bundle out of its patent on the drug.

For a drug which is not patentable, why shouldn't the costs of getting FDA approval be borne by the taxpayer?

sell or die

[geoff lane]

Using the well known US legal system, cancer patients will be suing any drug company with a possible cure that is not available because the company cannot make money on it.

Either that or India and China will be putting together production lines, RIGHT NOW, to market a generic version.

Re:How about socialism? [mod parent up]

[WarwickRyan]

Doesn't suggesting that make you an evil communist terrorist or something?

Mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

This is true, if there is no profit in making medicine's that are not patented why would companies be making those medicines?

Many foods are unpatented, yet millions of farmers exist worldwide. And I can walk into a store and buy one.

I had tiramisu at a restaurant, the recipe for it is not patented .. how come restaurants are making it?

Yes yes initial research costs of drugs blah blah. But there's still profits to be made, just that the returns come slowly. For example, if the cure to cancer cost $10 billion to develop, the cure can be sold for $10,000 per pill by the patent owner. But if the pill was not patented, the pill would have to be sold for $1,000 each and the company would still profit but it would take much longer to get back the $1 billion. Since it's a cure not a vaccine people will continue getting cancer, and so they will eventually recover the investment. If it was a cancer vaccine they still will make money because every person in the world will need it and also newborns into the future.

Investing in a company that finds cures make sense because they will make a LOT of money and this money will help them buy assets they can use to make even MORE money off other markets.

Nobody patented quinine (malaria cure) yet it was discovered and it's available cheap.

Re:Mod parent up

[phantomlord]

But if the pill was not patented, the pill would have to be sold for $1,000 each and the company would still profit but it would take much longer to get back the $1 billion.... Nobody patented quinine (malaria cure) yet it was discovered and it's available cheap.

Who says it'll sell at $1,000 each if its not patentable? What if it is sold at (cost to manufacture)+5% by a second manufacturer? We'd have a race to the bottom. WONDERFUL for the patients, HORRIBLE for the company who invested the hundreds of millions to get it through clinical trials. At $500 profit per pill, taking your $10 billion cost to develop, they would need to sell 20 million of them. At $5 profit per pill, they'd have to sell 2 billion of them. That is just to break even, it takes 2 billion +1 sales to make your first profit and that's assuming your competitors aren't selling it too since they will make a $5 profit on their first sale. From a business perspective, its an absolutely horrid ROI. You're better off investing that $10 billion in ANYTHING else, even a new idiotic dotcom, er Web 2.0, scheme.

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How about this

[Travoltus]

They can own the patent on the drug and then sell treatments to the very highest bidder.

The rich get cancer treatments.

The rest drop dead.

Zip yourself back up, dude.

Re:How about this

[susano_otter]

Have you done anything lately, at your own expense, to make a cure for cancer truly accessible to the non-rich?

I'm sure that if you wanted to, you could quit your job today and dedicate all your talent to developing a cheap cure for cancer. You could work for minimum wage, or even work for nothing at all, subsisting off of soup kitchens and the kindness of strangers.

So how do you explain your insistence on putting your own personal preferences ahead of a cure for cancer and a better tomorrow for hundreds of thousands of people? And as long as you insist on being selfish like this, how do you justify judging what other people do with the same freedoms you abuse every day?

11th thru 60th provinces have a request

[Harmonious Botch]

The provincial president that you guys put in charge here is causing a lot of trouble, starting wars and wrecking the environment. Will you please take him back for re-education, and appoint someone else?

BTW, it is sure good to finally know who is to blame for all the problems around here.

Re:11th thru 60th provinces have a request

[rumblin'rabbit]

Yeah, um, really, really sorry about that. We figured there's no way you wouldn't get the joke when we sent down "Prime Minister Bush", but then everybody down there took him real seriously and the whole thing just got out of hand.

We'll have back driving the Zamboni right away.

Oh dear lord, here come the loonies.

[JonTurner]

>>When the free market fails, as in this case, why not let government do it? Most major scientific breakthroughs have come from government funding.

That's correct. The free market *HAS* failed -- the government is interfering by their over-regulation. Thank the FDA and trial attorneys for making new drug development so cost-prohibitive.

But that's not what you meant, was it? You seem to have this idea that all good things come from government. "most major scientic breakthroughs"?? It is to laugh.
Well, then, it should be easy for you to provide a list of drug discoveries that came from government funding. But even if you could (and you can't b/c it's not true) that's not due to socialism.
I'm calling your bluff. Go ahead... name a few significant drugs discovered/invented in Socialist countries.
__________
__________
__________

From what I've seen, the West invents the drugs and the Socialist/Communist nations simply copy the work.

Re:Oh dear lord, here come the loonies.

[spun]

The west is socialist! Look at all the tax breaks given to big business. What we have here in the good ol' USA is socialism for the rich. Show me a single drug company that hasn't benefited from federal research grants. That's socialism.

Re:Oh dear lord, here come the loonies.

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

The west is socialist!

Every country is socialist and communist and capitalist in some blend.

What we have here in the good ol' USA is socialism for the rich.

Public schools are socialism, but the rich could more effectively pay for private schools and benefit more by denying that education to the poor. Medicare, social security, welfare, public roads, etc. etc. are all socialist policies in the USA. Sure socialism in the US is really messed up, but not only to benefit the rich.

Re:Oh dear lord, here come the loonies.

[Anonymous Coward]

Go ahead... name a few significant drugs discovered/invented in Socialist countries.
Meningitis B vaccine, from Cuba. In fact, Cuba has a world class biomedical industry.

Re:Oh dear lord, here come the loonies.

[Baba Ram Dass]

Look at all the tax breaks given to big business. What we have here in the good ol' USA is socialism for the rich. Show me a single drug company that hasn't benefited from federal research grants. That's socialism.

"Fascism is the marriage of corporate power and the state." -- Mussolini

Re:Oh dear lord, here come the loonies.

[matt21811]

If the US army funds the testing of anti malarial drugs by a private company do you count that as a discovery comming from the governement or a private company?

Re:Oh dear lord, here come the loonies.

[Tony]

You seem to have this idea that all good things come from government. "most major scientic breakthroughs"?? It is to laugh.

Hm. Many medical breakthroughs are done at universities with (you guessed it) heavy government funding. Government funding of DoD and NASA has led to many of the conveniences of modern life. Fact is, government funding contributes to a significant part of the economy. The government is directly and indirectly responsible for a great deal of scientific knowledge, either through directed research, or general grants.

Pure capitalism isn't very good for the economy, the government, or the people. It's too much like anarchy, in which no law applies. Capitalism requires regulation, just as a well-functioning society requires laws. (I believe a well-functioning society should also respect liberty and freedom, as well, but that's another debate entirely.)

An interesting discussion might be about the amount, type, and quality of government regulation. But, that's a debate for another day. Say, a day in which the separation of corporations and state is guarded as zealously as the separation of church and state. On that day, we can start talking about corporate regulations and the rule of law.

Re:Oh dear lord, here come the loonies.

[matt21811]

Agree with your general sentimenet but I want to point out that free, compulsary, public education benefits the rich enormously more than if it didn't exist. It benefits every one, I cant think of any big losers.

Re:Oh dear lord, here come the loonies.

[Anonymous Coward]

Say, a day in which the separation of corporations and state is guarded as zealously as the separation of church and state.

Oh oh! I think we are already living in this day; we just got there the wrong way...

Re:Oh dear lord, here come the loonies.

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Agree with your general sentimenet[sic] but I want to point out that free, compulsary, public education benefits the rich enormously more than if it didn't exist. It benefits every one, I cant think of any big losers.

I'd say that point is very arguable. It certainly benefits society as a whole, but if the wealthy can be relatively more educated than the general populace, by a greater degree, then they have an additional advantage when competing with the rest of the populace. The more ignorant the people are, the more easily led they will be.

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I've said it before

[Pojut]

and I'll say it again. Pharmecueticals are about MONEY, first and foremost. And to those in previous threads that have asked me how pharmaceuticals would resist certain potential cures due to more money being in the treatment than in the cure...

Now you have your answer, assholes.

Re:I've said it before

[Muad'Dib129]

YES! If everyone is fixed and not broken, then where the fuck will the pharmaceutical and medical industries get their money from? They will never develop cures as long as we as a populous accepts treatments as the best thing for our money. Our system is a treatment based system, not a system based on curing its people.

Re:I've said it before

[LividBlivet]

This also, oddly enough, explains why marijuana is illegal.

Perhaps we could set aside say 1% of the money used to prosecute and incarcerate marijuana offenders this year to develop and clinically trial his drug?

Naaah, makes too much sense.

Naturally!

[mpapet]

If they can't protect their market position, they won't make the investment. It has nothing to do with how many people's lives may be extended.

This is how deregulated industries benefit consumers. Ohh wait...

Lame

[pathos49]

First of all if their is no IP then that will not stop development. Actually, if these scientist would COLLABORATE, they would quickly find that institutions such as Pittsburgh, Harvard, UCLA and MANY OTHERS developing drugs that have fallen off patent or have no IP. Also, the NIH has a large division to do this as well. If the preclinical data is appealling, money WILL come

NOTE TO ALL: THe lion share of all new drugs coming out today are old drugs that are no longer patented and used on off targets. In other words they are the "side reactions" that were ignored the first time around I am currently involved in studies to bring a many decdes old drug out of the closet to be used for liver preservation during transplant.

Lastly as a greek, this scientist is an embarasment. Greeks are usually more clever.

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0.o

[Muad'Dib129]

I am not surprised. I watched my mother in law die of lung cancer a few years ago. Her best (insurance-funded, of course) option was radiation & chemotherapy. A few months ago (July-August), I watched my father go through practically the same thing. Once again, his best (and also insurance-funded) option was radiation & chemotherapy. One bill I saw, that he had to fork out $225 for (co-pay for it being over $20k), was almost $21,000. Why is there not a cure and treatments are our best option? The fat ass American medical industry and the pharmaceutical industry can charge 10K per session to the Insurance Industry, who just plain rips off the American people. It would be such a wonderful irony to see something that isn't patented become a cure...then it would be available to EVERY F*CK*NG PERSON who could throw down a few bucks for the cure, instead of having to rely on the bullshit fat ass Insurance, Medical and Pharmaceutical industries to give us these bullshit treatments that prolong the agony. There would be fierce competition for sales of this cure, therefore making the price of it affordable without the necessity for the Insurance company to intervene.

Re:0.o

[tOaOMiB]

It's so cheap? Go ahead and do it yourself. Treat yourself, your friends, whoever, to whatever drugs you can get your hands on. You want it to just cost a few bucks? That rules out getting a prescription. No doctor visits. Nobody watching over you to check for sideeffects. No robust clinical testing ahead of time to see if it really works or not.

Oh, you want public funds to pay for that? They should take the risk of spending billions for a drug that might fail? That doesn't sound too wise.

If you don't like the "bullshit treatments" that are available, don't use them. Don't buy insurance. Don't prolong your life. Don't prolong the agony. Nobody forced your motherinlaw or your father to get radiation and chemotherapy--it was given as a chance to save their lives, and more likely as a chance to prolong their lives. You think there's a different, easy way to just kill off cancerous cells? Go ahead and find it. I know I'm trying. Not then when I do I'll have any thanks from the likes of you--just more complaints about the cost, the sideeffects, the questions about why I didn't do more, didn't do better. Go and find the cure your own damn self.

Re:0.o

[RonBurk]

Why is there not a cure and treatments are our best option? The same reason that there is no magic bullet for software development, and we all keep futzing along pounding out code with an embarassingly high project failure rate: complexity.

Cancer is not reasonably viewed as a single disease, it's highly unlikely there will ever be "a" cure for it, and thinking that the only problem is how profits are made requires ignoring a whole lot of facts.

How profits are made is one problem in the cancer industry (a nearly direct quote from the head of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle), but it the nuts and bolts technical problems are also enormous. Humans just aren't smart enough to tackle this damn complicated problem effectively. Yet.

Re:0.o

[Muad'Dib129]

1. I never said it was cheap. 2. I never said it was easy or that no one was actually trying. All I said was that the BULLSHIT the pharmaceutical industry focuses on is TREATMENT AS OPPOSED TO CURE. If your station in life isn't satisfying enough for you and you think that the people don't appreciate your work, then get a frycook job at McDonald's. Obviously you've never had to watch a loved one suffer from the TREATMENT as much as the FUCKING DISEASE. Asshole.

what about other countries?

[amigabill]

This may be true in USA and some other countries. But what about other places where there is more social medicine system in place? Maybe a government somewhere would sponsor the research, and eventualy big pharma in USA will pick up the finished product to sell to dieing people here, without having to bother with all that expensive research themselves.

Just patent the "business model" of curing cancer

[kaltkalt]

Simple solution, if you can't patent the actual drug, patent the "business model" of curing cancer. We all know the PTO would grant such a patent without a second look. If "curing cancer" is too broad, then patent the business model of curing cancer with a pharmaceutical sold at a profit. That'll be more than enough to pass the rubber stamp test.

See? I was right...

[robyannetta]

I *STILL* have cancer to this day because of the bullcrap like this.

IMHO as a cancer patient, the reason why there's no 'cure' to different types of diseases (including diabetes) is because the pharmaceutical companies make billions of dollars a year keeping us sick. If there was a cure, there goes their profits.

I would like to see a law passed that says that if a cure if found and not distributed within a viable time frame to the general public (lets say 10 years), the company can be charged with genocide.

Will it happen? Hell no. There's too many people in power in Washington who owns stocks in these companies.

- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage many vary...

Re:See? I was right...

[IHC Navistar]

*sniff* *sniff* .....I smell a conspiracy theorist!

Re:See? I was right...

[IHC Navistar]

Also, if you are going to blame your current problems on someone else, try doing a better job. Did you ever think that you still have cancer for other reasons? Sure, drug companies are evil giant Empires that feed and thrive on the Dark Side of the Force, but they aren't the reason that you still have cancer.

If you ask ANY respected oncologist (no, not the 'alternative', 'holistic', 'spiritual' new-wave voodoo witch doctors that call themselves doctors), or even a lowly medical intern, they'll probably laugh at you and explain that you still have cancer because it is either spreading, malignant, or current therapies are just not affecting it. But then again, judging from your arguments, anyone who tells you that your obviously and fatally flawed argument is wrong is just another apprentice of the Dark Side of the Force and probably the manifestation of the Anti-Christ Himself.

Oh, if drug companies were out to get us, hen they havent been getting their money's worth with me, seeing as I haven't had anything worse than a hangover in the last 17 years. Oh wait! I'll bet that hangover is just an evil attck that Tylenol, Excedrin, and Advil are behind! I'll bet my local saloon is just a front company for the Big Three as a means for them to enact their evil agenda by distributing headache-inducing alcohol! Then, when we are suffering horribly from hangovers, we will be more likely to buy their produts!

IT'S A CONSPIRACY I SAY! DOWN WITH THE TRUE EVIL EMPIRE!

btw..... It wouldn't happen to be brain cancer, would it?

Maybe you should be seeing a psychologist in addition to your oncologist.....

Re:See? I was right...

[tOaOMiB]

I'm sorry to hear you have cancer. However, I assure you this is not because the pharmaceutical companies are keeping a miracle cure under wraps. In addition to the boatload of cash they would make with a cure (and they would--there would always be plenty of new patients to cure), a lot of them really are headed by well-meaning scientists who would like nothing better than to help the world.

Think about this: How many people do you know who have cancer? Well guess what--comparing the average age of a slashdotter to the average age of a pharmaceutical CEO, and I'd guess the CEO knows quite a few more. And has relatives with cancer.

Next: Imagine how many people with cancer the scientists running the clinical studies know? And the oncologists who are often involved in the research? These people care, man. They care about their patients, their friends, their family, and themselves.

I'm afraid the number one reason you still have cancer is because it's a darn hard disease to cure. The reason people still have diabetes is because it's a hard disease to cure. Hell, every disease is hard to cure, and it's a miracle we have treatments for the symptoms. I want you to know though, I know many, many, many people who want nothing more than to help people with disease, in whatever way they can. There are good people out there doing research, both public and private. Those people dominate the people in research. Have faith.

Re:See? I was right...

[geekoid]

That's crap.

If they could cure diabetes they would, because that would mean 100s of billions, plus personal kickbacks from insurance companies. Assuming they play there cards 'right'.

Are you serious in thinking that someone executives are ging to put off millions in bonuses for them TODAY in order to help whomever the next person that comes around is?

Shit man, they would end up being THE powerhouse.

Now, aboutthe topic at hand:
It is also crap. No company is going to through off millions of dollars just ebcause they will need to compete. That doesn't even include the non us companies that would have no reason not to do this even if your diatribe was even moderatly correct.

This is just someone using cancer and finger waving to try and 'prove' patents are bad.

Re:See? I was right...

[DirtMcGirt]

A lot of [pharmaceutical company CEOs] really are headed by well-meaning scientists who would like nothing better than to help the world.

Big Pharma wants nothing more than to help the world? Please. These are businesses we're talking about. Their objective is making money - only - and they'll do whatever makes the most money. You may or may not think there's anything wrong with this, but it's certainly at right angles to every notion of human morality. If the drug companies wanted to help the world over all else, they would give free AIDS drugs to all of Africa, no matter the cost. If this was a troll, well played.

Re:See? I was right...

[nanoakron]

Again and again I see these conspiracy theories spring up in print and on the web.

and again and again they are flawed because of one single reason - they only account for the health service in the USA.

In Europe, where healthcare is socialised and government-run, the government (that's right, the same guys who buy the drugs from big pharma to the guys to allow their licenses and patents to remain legal) has no, absolutely none whatsoever, no reason to keep people sick. They're less productive. They're more of a tax burden on the rest of society.

Sick people cost money.

In the US, that comes out of your own pocket. Boo hoo, cry to big pharma about the drugs you have to pay for. It must be a conspiracy, the cure is just around the corner.

In the EU, that money comes from the government. People too greedy and selfish to want big pharma to keep cures hidden.

Now please get your head out of your arse.

Re:See? I was right...

[yabos]

If they cured diabetes they'd sell the cure to someone for a one time price of a few thousand dollars. Compare that to a lifetime of insulin and which comes out ahead? They make more money keeping the person on insulin than they would if they had a cure.

Re:See? I was right...

[Anonymous Coward]

I see you're stuggling to crack a rating of "2" on any of your posts. Stupidity must be a real bitch.

Re:See? I was right...

[Eivind Eklund]

These are collections of people, too. Abstracting it to "businesses" doesn't remove that factor. In some cases, these are good people, in some cases, they are bad people - and they still function as people. They need to somehow justify what they are doing to themselves.

The systems around companies often make people behave badly - yet there's a limit to how badly and for how many, and especially when things hit their own family. The couple of people I know that work in pharma are reasonably good people; and in general, the researchers I know in any discipline does this because they want to help people. (The only person I know that does research in pharma works in a university lab, not for big pharma, though.)

Eivind.

Re:See? I was right...

[Eivind Eklund]

Read the parent again. You are completely ignoring his argument (which is actually based on personal, present greed among executives and investors.)

Re:See? I was right...

[Rich0]

I would like to see a law passed that says that if a cure if found and not distributed within a viable time frame to the general public (lets say 10 years), the company can be charged with genocide.

Great idea!

I have another one. Require all high school students to take a medical aptitude test. If they're capable of administering an injection then if they don't spend the next 30 years treating homeless people (for $10k/year of government funding) they should be charged with GENOCIDE!!!! After all, if somebody is capable of saving lives, and chooses not to, then they're just a greedy bastard!

Viola - the health crisis is solved!

Re:See? I was right...

[Anonymous Coward]

I would like to see a law passed that says that if a cure if[sic] found and not distributed within a viable time frame to the general public (lets say 10 years), the company can be charged with genocide.

(emphasis added)

Congratulations, you have just invented the perfect way to prevent the company in question from ever looking for a cure! After all, the best way to avoid being accused of sitting on a cure is to not research one. Well done.

Anyone who speaks well of socialism is a loony?

[Anonymous Coward]

Way to win debate points with that AWESOME ad hominem, dude! You rock, those moronic socialists are teh SUCK!!

Universities?

[rrohbeck]

Then why isn't a university running the necessary studies? Yeah, they cost a lot of money, but if the potential payoff is as big as it seems, funding shouldn't be a big issue.

Already used by pharmacists for something else

[OpenGLFan]

If I'm correct, it's also used to treat lactic acidosis, so it's already at your local pharmacy in a form certified safe to swallow. Assuming you've got cancer, you've probably got a doctor already. Feign an overabundance of lactic acid and see if he'll write you a scrip. (Or, depending on his trust in you, try honesty and beg him to let you try some.)

Even better solution

[Anonymous Coward]

The Leftist Atheist Scientists and Conservative Christian Republicans would agree with it, ban all natural remidies and go with chemical remidies. *me ducks* ;)

Unreasonable

[forand]

How in the world is this insightful? You are recommending to people who have no clue what the consequences of just going out and taking some medication might be to give it a whirl since it isn't a controlled substance. Regardless of how we would all love to find out that you could just go to the grocery and grab a bottle of "No More Cancer," suggesting that people experiment on themselves is NOT a reasonable suggestion. Science is not the culmination of anecdotal evidence, just because it worked for someone does not mean it will work for you nor that what you think happened is actually what happened (e.g. just because you no longer have cancer after giving it a try doesn't mean that it was what caused the remission) Giving out advice as you have should be done with great care which you have not displayed.

Re:Unreasonable

[jackelfish]

Seriously, I never told anybody to go to the store (I stand corrected on the ease of purchasing it by the way), buy DCA and take it. I said you could if you wanted to (which you can), just like you can go to the drugstore and buy a bottle of acetaminophen for your headache another bottle of cold medication for your congestion and accidentally kill yourself that way as well. Lots of people do stupid things every day in the hopes that it will make them bigger, better, healthier, stronger (DMSO, mega doses of Vitamin C, Steroids). However, you missed my point. I was not saying that DCA is a either a valid treatment for cancer or that you should actually take it, I was pointing out that if this treatment truly works, it will not take big Pharma to bring it into general use as a treatment for cancer. Lets also not get started with anecdotal evidence and drug discovery. How about paclitaxel, colchicne and vinca alkaloids to name a few. These are all drugs that were discovered when the active ingredients in plants, commonly used for killing people, were shown to be quite effective at killing cancer cells also (OK, vinblastine was actually discovered while looking at treatments for Type 1 diabetes). Don't misinterpret this also, I would never suggest that someone go and eat some periwinkle leaves instead of visiting their oncologist when they find out they have non-small cell lung cancer. This reminds me of a comedy skit I heard on the CBC the other day about warning labels on tires that say: For your safety, do not place your head between the rubber and the pavement.

Re:Unreasonable

[ebers]

> How in the world is this insightful? You are recommending to people who have no clue what the consequences of just going out and
taking some medication might be to give it a whirl since it isn't a controlled substance. Regardless of how we would all love to find out that you could just go to the grocery and grab a bottle of "No More Cancer," suggesting that people experiment on themselves is NOT a reasonable suggestion.

And yet it is wholly reasonable for us to experiment on people in clinical trials. Why is it ethical to do this? Because people consent to it knowing the risks. They do this because they are desperate (dying of cancer) and have exhausted the conventional treatments. A lot of animal tests go on before those clinical trials to show that 1) the drug probably does something good and 2) the drug isn't poisonous at the dose needed to show a positive effect.

All we have now is some tissue experiments and a fairly large (low toxicity) animal LD50. This is just the beginnning of the background work needed before a human clinical trial. But this is only a quantitatively changes the decision about whether or not it is rational for a desperate person to participate in an experiment with the drug. It doesn't qualitatively change the ethics of the experimentation. For a sufficiently desperate person who is well informed of the potential risks and benefits (NOT deceived by a quack's marketing ploys), self-experimentation might be rational. Allowing this person that choice certainly is ethical.

>Science is not the culmination of anecdotal evidence, just because it worked for someone does not mean it will work for you nor that what you think happened is actually what happened (e.g. just because you no longer have cancer after giving it a try doesn't mean that it was what caused the remission) Giving out advice as you have should be done with great care which you have not displayed.

Scientific inquiries often begin with anecdotal evidence. Sometimes it's all wrong, but there are diamonds in the rough. You are right that science is much more than the accumulation of anecdotes, but the desperate person dying of cancer doesn't have time to wait for science to separate false anecdote from fact, and anyway it's their body and thus up to them as to what they want to do with each anecdote they hear about.

As Asomov said, science isn't about "eureka!", it's about "that's funny." Once the story of "that's funny" starts to get around, (possibly with a false explanation of the curious observation), then it's an anecdote.

Re:Unreasonable

[Xybot]

I'm guessing you don't have terminal cancer.

Re:Unreasonable

[yabos]

If I had cancer I'd sure as hell try anything I could get my hands on. You're likely to die anyways so if taking some unproven pills will work then there's no reason why someone shouldn't try it. The only thing that is unknown is the dose but I'm sure now that this study is getting in the news more trials will be done and a dose will eventually be worked out.

Astounding!

[ShakaUVM]

Researchers are always being "astounded". Honestly, you'd think science reporters could have come up with some new verbs by now that don't make (presumably intelligent) researchers not sound like excitable pre-teens.

Re:Astounding!

[KillerBob]

If I told you that Penicillin has been found to have an effect speeding bone knitting, and could be used to help you heal from a broken bone in half the time it used to take, you'd probably be pretty surprised. Maybe even enough to use the word "astounded", though somebody might throw a thesaurus at you.

But that's about the level that this news is. DCA has been used for decades to treat lactic acidosis, a buildup of lactic acid in your body. To a lesser extent than they normally prescribe DCA for, it's the same chemical and biological process that gives you cramps when you exercise for too long. And now it's been found out that it can cause cancer cells to start dying again. Pretty big news. A cure for cancer has been a holy grail of medicine since the birth of modern medicine, and even though this probably won't be a panacea, it is still pretty big, because we don't have anything else that causes cancer cells to start dying naturally again.

But isn't this work already done?

[emil]

Since this drug is already used to treat mitchondrial problems in general, aren't toxicity and dosage guidelines already known? Hasn't the FDA already approved the drug for those applications?

If so, can't most of that data be used for this approval, which is re-tasking an existing, known, and approved drug? Is it really a minimum of new clinical data that's required as opposed to a completely new drug?

Not non toxic

[Anonymous Coward]

"DCA at 25 mg/kg/day is associated with peripheral nerve toxicity resulting in a high rate of medication discontinuation and early study termination. Under these experimental conditions, the authors were unable to detect any beneficial effect."

http://www.neurology.org/cgi/content/abstract/66/3 /324

Re:DCA look like an interresting bugger(link insid

[Anonymous Coward]

I did not find what I was searching : negative effect DL50 or DL90...

That may be because you were looking for the LD50. FYI, it appears to be > 3000mg/kg (some sources report 4-5g/kg... I've never checked, myself), but... if you want to check Google, yourself, go ahead.

FYI, here's some government funded research relating cytotoxicity and acute oral LD50 for a whole bunch of chemicals. Sodium dichloroacetate does not appear to be amongst them, however.

You got it backwards

[Ogemaniac]

The problem is precisely the LACK of a patent system for this type of scenario. This drug shows exactly what would happen WITHOUT a patent system - no one would have an incentive to develop and test new drugs, because anyone else would copycat without the upfront costs, and win therefore win the price war.

Re:You got it backwards

[Abcd1234]

The problem is the reliance on profit motive for development of new drugs. The need to patent drugs is simply a way to counteract this.

Fortunately, countries like Canada are willing to spend money to develop drugs that everyone can benefit from.

Re:You got it backwards

[Phillup]

The problem is precisely the LACK of a patent system for this type of scenario. This drug shows exactly what would happen WITHOUT a patent system Actually, it shows what happens when patenting a different drug is an option.

The fact that there IS a patent system in place and that this drug can NOT be patented is why nobody is looking at it.

The story would be a bit different if there were NO patents for ANY drugs.

no one would have an incentive to develop and test new drugs, because anyone else would copycat without the upfront costs, and win therefore win the price war. There would be incentive if every drug were treated the same (no monopoly due to pantents). Just look at the supplement market to get an idea... Lots of people make vitamin C supplements (for example). And it isn't because of patents.

It is because of this little thing called "competition".

Re:You got it backwards

[Firethorn]

The story would be a bit different if there were NO patents for ANY drugs.

Then nobody would be developing new drugs, or if they were they'd be working on how to obfusticate the real drug and hiding how to produce it(trade secrets).

Then you'd have publicly develop and manufacture new drugs because nobody would be interested in taking the effort.

Vitamin C as an example is a bit of a misnomer - It's a naturally occuring product that's been out for quite a while and is a known part of basic nutrition. Also, take a look at how much marketing goes on to somehow differentiate their product from somebody else's.

Re:You got it backwards

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is the reliance on profit motive for development of new drugs. Feel free to start developing new drugs on your own with whatever motives you choose. Or were you saying OTHER people should be forced to do it that way while you go off and do whatever the hell you want?

Re:You got it backwards

[hackus]

I think your missing the point.

Why do people have to make a profit when it comes to peoples health.

There is something....not quite right about that.

Primarily due to the fact it is making a coin from human misery, illness.

Capitalism is great for a lot of things, but it should be removed from the decision logic tree when it comes to peoples well being.

Otherwise we have a society like we have today, secret health care for the wealthy and the powerful, and public health care for the rest of us.

-Hack

Re:You got it backwards

[kripkenstein]

The problem is precisely the LACK of a patent system for this type of scenario. This drug shows exactly what would happen WITHOUT a patent system - no one would have an incentive to develop and test new drugs, because anyone else would copycat without the upfront costs, and win therefore win the price war.

No, what this shows is that complete reliance on the drug companies is a problem. We simply cannot expect the drug companies to do all important biomedical research. And we don't - there are also nonprofit research bodies, e.g. universities.

If no drug company is interested in funding studies on this new drug, I can only hope that some academic research group will. They certainly have plenty of motivation - pure altruism, a possible Nobel prize, etc. And there is lots of money in academic medical research - both from government grants (which should be higher, but are still significant), and from donations. Aging rich people tend to be concerned about health-related issues, which leads many of them to make sizable donations (my scholarship is currently paid by such people).

Value of risk

[jbeaupre]

Nice post. With you up to the risk part. "Big Pharma" isn't necessarily risk adverse. They calculate the odds and make their bets. In fact, the high degree of risk in their business model may explain the profits. Risk tends to correlate to returns. Anyone who has done an investment portfolio learns right off the bat that low risk investments (bonds, etc) have low returns and high risk investments (hedge funds) have high returns. Derivatives are literally someone buying and selling risk.

Ok, I'm ignoring barriers to entry etc., but you get the point. So maybe "unnecessary risk adverse" might work better?

Re:Value of risk

[JonTurner]

>>Ok, I'm ignoring barriers to entry etc., but you get the point. So maybe "unnecessary risk adverse" might work better?

It does. Excellent analysis.

*sigh*... it's ALREADY APPROVED, PEOPLE

[sbma44]

RTFA, and pay attention to how FDA approvals work. Once a drug has been approved by the FDA, doctors are able to prescribe it for *anything* they want. It's called "off-label" use, and it happens all the time -- one example is doctors prescribing various drugs designed to treat prostate problems for the purpose of stopping hair loss. Although there are various ethical constraints on this practice, off-label use means that this drug doesn't need to go through expensive trials before cancer patients will be able to buy it -- a desperate patient just needs to find one doctor who's willing to give it a shot. More studies on its efficacy ought to be conducted, and will have to be before it can be marketed as a cancer drug. But I seriously doubt that it will simply be discarded because it's cheap.

There are real problems with our pharma system -- the lack of incentives for vaccine development outside of unpredictable government subsidies is a big one -- but this isn't actually a case of it screwing over anybody. Not yet, anyway.

LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

So are you going to charge _yourself_ with this because you don't
research alternatives like pegysomal quercetin yourself?

http://clincancerres.aacrjournals.org/cgi/content/ abstract/12/10/3193

There are many effective cancer treatments out there. Just because
some drug company isn't spending loads advertising it on NBC doesn't
mean is doean't exist. Check out www.grouppekurosawa.com and other
such sites for another view.

MedIcines can get developed in a numer of ways

[Vainglorious Coward]

Guess you've never heard of Jonas Salk?

Re:MedIcines can get developed in a numer of ways

[susano_otter]

Ever heard about all the self-centered jerks who don't bother to do even half of what Salk did, at enormous personal sacrifice, but still run around the Internet self-righteously prescribing how other people (never themselves!) should spend their free time and resources?

If everybody acted like Salk, or Mother Theresa, or Albert Schweitzer, big farma would vanish overnight, and most of the world's troubles would vanish as well.

But instead everybody rants about big pharma's profit motive; while callously going about their daily business of self-service; and demanding that the government force somebody else, somewhere else, to give up their lifestyle in the service of a better tomorrow for all mankind.

I mean, let's look at you. You hold up Salk as an example, but tell me, how far have you traveled in his footsteps lately? How much further forward have you carried his work? How much have you treasured his legacy and helped it prosper? How do you live with yourself, when at the end of the day you think of all the things you could have done to better humanity, but didn't do because you were more interested in profiting yourself?

Good thing this is in Canada...

[Arrgh]

...where we believe that governments have a responsibility to set policy for, and even fund, public health initiatives that are not necessarily advantageous to any given industry sector or corporation.

The research in question was funded by a Canadian federal government agency, and I'm certain that one or two well-funded, non-profit and/or public sector agencies will step up to the plate to study whether the proposed treatment is safe, and if so, some smart non-intellectual-property-driven and yet profitable organization will market it.

Re:Good thing this is in Canada...

[FallLine]

The research in question was funded by a Canadian federal government agency, and I'm certain that one or two well-funded, non-profit and/or public sector agencies will step up to the plate to study whether the proposed treatment is safe, and if so, some smart non-intellectual-property-driven and yet profitable organization will market it.

This misunderstanding is typical of you anti-patent people. You can buy this drug at drug stores today. No need for generic manufacturers to produce it. You need someone who will actually spend a lot of bunch to test the drug and prove that it is safe. All they have right now is some evidence that it works in a petri dish and in mice.

There is a very real chance that the drug won't work (cancer and diabetes discoveries like these have a loooooooooooong history of not working in real life patients and sometimes even killing them) and it will take many several hundred millions of dollars to find out with any certainty. This means that your "generic" drug companies will have to invest lots of money and, even then, their investments may all be for naught. The "generic" drug company would be stupid to pay for it because even if they prove the drug works, other companies could come in very quickly and sell it at its actual marginal cost (way below the price they could recoup R&D on) or doctors will simply prescribe the existing compound to patients (presuming this drug requires no modification).

How much do you want to bet that you never hear about this drug as a cure for cancer several years from now?

Re:Good thing this is in Canada...

[Arrgh]

Thanks for your response, but if you had read my comment more closely, you would see that I suggested that two different classes of organization should:

1. investigate whether the proposed drug is safe and/or effective as a treatment for various types of cancer (i.e. cancer research agencies, with no profit incentive), and if so:
   
2. produce pharmaceuticals to deliver the drug (i.e. generic manufacturers, who make a profit that's somewhat limited by natural competition, rather than inflated by monopoly rents)
   

Re:Good thing this is in Canada...

[evilviper]

Good thing this is in Canada... ...where we believe that governments have a responsibility to set policy for, and even fund, public health initiatives that are not necessarily advantageous to any given industry sector or corporation.

As opposed to the National Institute of Health (NIH) in the US... because those guys are just dicks?

What?

Re:Good thing this is in Canada...

[Arrgh]

Obviously you're right that Canada has no monopoly on public-sector health research. My comment was intended to show that while the premise of this post's headline, namely that the possibility of profit is necessary to motivate research into new drugs and medical procedures, is pretty much the prevailing attitude in the US, it's a different story elsewhere.

I would never argue that corporations should be coerced into doing research that's primarily in the public interest rather than their own, although it's easy to imagine an effective incentive program that could push the balance a bit. I do argue, however, that research that is unlikely to result in any commercial gain, but nonetheless shows promise for benefiting the public, needs to be funded, and that's a job for strong, well-funded public and nonprofit sector agencies.

The big problem

[LunaticTippy]

Someone needs to pony up a billion dollars for clinical trials. No drug company wants to unless they have a monopoly on the drug. There's your fucking problem!

Intelligence and acumen reside with "business"

[Anonymous Coward]

No the acumen and intelligence reside with "me" free to make my own choices.

The collective "me"s comprise the free market "we" are talking about.

The government acts on behalf of business and do-gooders and know-betters to deny me my choice as they don't want me to have any or don't approve of the choices I make.

Re:Intelligence and acumen reside with "business"

[DirtMcGirt]

The problem is that most people consistently make bad choices.

DCA is already available and prescribed...

[FellowConspirator]

DCA is already a commercially available as a compound and has been studied quite a bit as a treatment for various disorders (congenital lactic acidosis, MELAS, mitochondrial disorders, etc.)

It's relatively toxic (liver damage, neuropathy). I would guess that a company that would try it as a cancer treatment could develop some much-simplified trials since the toxicology is pretty well worked out. It's also very cheap to make and prepare.

Even without a patent, I would guess that you could turn a profit in this case. There's no development cost, no toxicology, just efficacy trials for the new indication.

That said, companies are poor choices for finding cures for diseases. Treating a disease is profitable, curing it much less so. Cures for diseases out to be sought by non-profits and academic institutions, and then once something passes FDA muster, it can be turned over to drug companies for production and distribution as a generic drug. This isn't generally how it is done, but there's also no reason it cannot be done this way.

Pathologies in drug development

[Michael Woodhams]

This is one of several pathologies in the current model of drug development:

* "Me too" drugs: large amounts of money spent to create a drug very similar to another one already on the market. This doesn't (usually) do anything to benefit humanity as a whole, it just gives a second drug company entry into some market.

* Lack of research on new uses for out-of-patent drugs

* Lack of research on drugs for diseases of poor people/countries

* Very high markups to recover research/testing costs

and arguably one might also include

* Very high costs and long times to get approval

* Development of drugs for "conditions" which aren't really that important, until drug company marketing departments make them so.

As usual, it is easier to see the problems than the solutions - I'm not offering any here. It may be that for some areas, the current system is working just fine, but it is clearly failing in other areas.

Well there are non profit Pharmaceutical Companies

[Anonymous Coward]

In July of 2000, Dr. Hale founded the Institute for OneWorld Health, the first nonprofit pharmaceutical company in the United States. Its mission was to develop safe, effective, and affordable new medicines for those most in need.

Drawing upon gifted scientific minds and the innovative business model they had created, Dr. Hale and her colleagues set out to develop the pipeline of potential drug leads into approved new medicines at a fraction of the cost of conventional pharmaceutical development. To ensure success, the team stressed partnership and collaboration with industry and international research institutions. To ensure affordability, they sought donated and royalty-free licensing of intellectual property and identified research and manufacturing capacity in the developing world.

http://www.oneworldhealth.org/

A perfect match I'd say - These guys could produce and market a cure for cancer they can make a little money on it here in our part of the world, while using the profits let's say a couple of percent, on making drugs for other diseases available in the developing world... and hey whadyaknow - They also have cancer in developing countries!!!

Or let these folks take it up!

[hemanr]

Non profit pharmaceutical company. http://www.oneworldhealth.org/

Re:Or let these folks take it up!

[Lost Engineer]

Non profit does not necessarily mean they have the funds to prove this drug effective on cancer. Seems like the Canadian researchers are ready to handle this themselves anyways. This whole story is political FUD.

Ah, but you see...

[Colin Smith]

Canada has a nationalised healthcare system...

Shoot them

[Anonymous Coward]

Any pharma person that refuses to research a cure for a disease (especialy one that killing millions) because they don't think they can make a profit on it should be taken out an summarily executed. They are worthless and don't really classify as human beings.

Cheap

[drooling-dog]

The other problem is that dichloroacetic acid is a very cheap and easily produced chemical, on the order of things like aspirin and vitamin C. Nobody's going to be able to charge $10,000 for a month's supply (whatever that is) when you can go out and buy the raw compound for $30 a kilogram or so.

Maybe the best chance (though a dangerous one) for it is for people to just start using it as an unregulated "nutritional supplement"; then maybe the new NIH institute that tests "alternative" therapies (I forget its name) will have to conduct the safety and efficacy trials.

Re:Cheap

[deevnil]

Which supplement will you take, this stuff or BarleyGreen? They already have cancer curing supplements.

lithium

[Anonymous Coward]

I read something similar about lithium carbonate. Bi-polar depression (it used to be called manic depression) was untreatable until litium carbonate. But it sat around for a decade after its use was discovered, because it was an ordinary chemical that had first been synthesized a century earlier and so couldn't be patented, and so the drug companies wouldn't put any money into doing all the needed testing.

Drug patents also introduce some controls

[lbbros]

I'll elaborate. When you have to present an application for a drug patent you have to deliver a *load* of information. Specifically you must give details about the drug, physical and chemical properties, mechanism of action and a lot more. Plus, you have to give details about the manufacturing process and, more importantly, *preliminary toxicological results*.

You don't want a drug to go around untested, do you? The case of Talidomide should remind everyone that strict testing is essential.

Developing a drug isn't just seeing if it works on tissues. Countless molecules that were promising in vitro were then scrapped because they didn't work at all in vivo. And all that testing has a cost, quite large.
Now, pharmaceutical companies *aren't* nice and some are truly evil, but equating "no patent" with "good" isn't better either.

An area that *needs* public intervention, instead, is the one about "orphan drugs", that are drugs that aren't developed because they're considered not profitable (e.g.: a cure for malaria, or other endemic diseases in the underdeveloped countries). But this story seems biased to me.

Are you trying to troll me?

[Dr Caleb]

Yes it does. And that system is cheaper per capita, and results in Canadians having a 1.5 year longer average lifespan.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_and_American _health_care_systems_compared

Re:Are you trying to troll me?

[Anonymous Coward]

He's implying that it didn't matter how much the drug cost, because none of the cost was carried by the people who directly needed it.

Or trolling, I'm not sure which. Certainly, the cost of drugs is less important when you're socializing the cost of care.

Re:Are you trying to troll me?

[Dr Caleb]

Well, then he's trolling. 'Nationalized Healthcare' means we pay for it through our taxes, so price does matter. Many cancer treatments can run $12,000 a month, and are not covered by many provincial healthcare plans.

There are many things we must pay for, out of pocket. Perscription drugs and non-approved cancer treatments are two of them.

Re:Are you trying to troll me?

[dryeo]

Actually the average Canadian still has to pay for their drugs. Exceptions include people on income assistance, pensioners and perhaps others.

Re:Are you trying to troll me?

[Martin Foster]

Prisoners, military, federal employees and I'd assume political personalities. Mind you these days they do seem to qualify military health care as employee benefits.

Re:Are you trying to troll me?

[maxume]

How do you factor in drug development costs? Canada negotiates aggressively, so drug companies that are already manufacturing a drug will run the numbers, figure out that they can make more money selling at the price Canada wants than not selling the drug(i.e. they sell to Canada based much more on their marginal cost of manufacturing rather than their marginal cost of development). The amount isn't at all clear, but it seems pretty likely that it is at least there.

hmmmm.. i remember

[supermegadope]

when i submitted this yesterday...maybe my submitting virginity showed, no one wants to give it to a tech geek slashdot virgin --smd

kinda reminds me...

[SP33doh]

kinda reminds me of ghost in the shell: stand alone complex, and the whole cyber-brain sclerosis situation...

What free market?

[drooling-dog]

There's nothing "free market" about the way patents work. A patent is the Government's way of granting you an artificial monopoly on something, and of helping you to defend it through the force of law. It's the opposite of a free market.

Yet, the free market conservatives and libertarians defend it as if it were something implicit in Natural Law or granted by God. Go figure.

Re:What free market?

[spun]

Even Adam Smith knew that, paradoxically, a free market needs regulation in order to remain free. Free market fanbois of all stripes forget that market forces can be used to manipulate the market in unfair ways that damage the efficient function of the market. They think that government power is the only kind of power that can mess up a market, which is just silly.

Penicillin Redux

[iliketrash]

If all of this turns out to be true, it would be a sad re-playing of the history of penicillin. Some say that Sir Fleming's decision to not patent penicillin and to instead make it freely available delayed its acceptance and a the development of a viable method of mass production by 10-15 years for exactly the same reason as cited above--no company saw a benefit in making a product which was essentially a commodity from the beginning. The resulting unnecessary deaths, some spanning World War II, as a result of this misguided altruism, is a true tragedy--and perhaps a lesson for those who don't appreciate property rights generally.

Non-toxic?

[silicone_chemist]

"A small, non-toxic molecule..."

Dichloroacetate, methyl ester: Sigma-Aldrich 35840 Emergency Overview: Corrosive, causes burns, irritating to the eyes and respiratory system. Lachrymator. (Lachrymator, n, a gas that makes the eyes fill with tears but does not damage them.)

Dichloroacetate, potassium salt: Sigma-Aldrich 348082 Emergency Overview: Toxic by inhalation, in contact with skin and if swallowed. Irritating to the skin, eyes and respiratory tract.

Dichloroacetate, sodium salt: Sigma-Aldrich 347795 Emergency Overview: Irritant. Irritating to the skin, eyes and respiratory tract. Carcinogen, Tumorigenic: causes liver tumors.

Pharma solution

[Anonymous Coward]

There will be a half-dozen companies that will tweak a methyl group or something and then patent the "new" chemical and roll on. Don't worry, if it cures something, then there is money to be made in many ways.

But you can patent a combo

[jbx]

Even if DCA can't be patented, the use of DCA in combination with some other drug *can* be patented. Enforcement might be an issue, but if the results of DCA in combination with something else are even better than DCA by itself, this is something the drug companies would pursue.

As a side note, DCA is described as "relatively non-toxic". Ummmm.... relatively?? As Venkman said, could we clarify that? I'm a little unclear on the whole non-toxic/relatively non-toxic thing.

Wowah hold on here....

[argoff]

Let me get this straight, the government grants companies this personal monopoly (patents) under the justification that it will incentivize them to create usefull things (it didn't), and then the government makes these massice FDA regulations that only huge mega corporations can wade their way thru, and now that nothing usefull can freaking get done we're told that the best solution is for the government to fund the research and development.

Well bullshit, the best solution is to kill the patent system and the FDA and give me back my goddam tax money while they're at it.

Touched a nerve or something?

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, let's look at you

Maybe if you actually did just that, perhaps we'd be spared your silly screed. You can't even spell "medicine" FFS, let alone discuss it rationally.

VC

Bureaucrats see cancer cure as liability.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Well, then, it should be easy for you to provide a list of drug discoveries that came from government funding. But even if you could (and you can't b/c it's not true) that's not due to socialism.

Not only that: Those administering government programs view drugs to cure cancers or otherwise extend life as a liability.

They perceive such drugs and treatments as extending the period when retired workers consume government-funded medical care and retirement entitlements, putting the already-stressed system further at risk. (As one of them, discussing a previous iteration of the social-security demographic crisis, once said on CNN, "We have to get the death rate up to meet the birth rate.")

So don't expect a lot of help from government.

profit may not be best motive for society?

[lpq]

Seems like profits of big pharma may not be the best way to "incentivize" medical cures. Cancer cures are only profitable if the patient has to maintain a lifetime regime of the drug and if it can be patented (i.e. - one pharma has a monopoly). Similar problem is happening in antibiotic research (post-antibiotic apocalypse anyone?).

Why should they bother?

[SnarfQuest]

Let's say a drug company produces this, and makes one dollar over manufactoring costs per bottle. Someone has a reaction to it, like their hair turns blue. This will obviously mean that they will be sued for $3 billion, and probably lose. So, to make any profit, they need to sell more than 3 billion bottles for each lawsuit brought against them. They would be bleeding money.

Ok, now determine the optimium "price" one of these companies would need to charge for each bottle just to cover the huge lawsuits from cancer sufferers, who are not in the best of health to start with, and may be taking other "non-perscription remedies" that they wouldn't admit to. Remember, the more you charge, the larger the lawsuits will be, because you are evily profiting from the suffering of others.

Now, add in the costs of advertising, legal fees, taxes, insurance, ...

Now, note that your "customers" will probably buy a cheap knock-off version from China through a Canadian pharmacy, but will still sue you for any problems that occur.

Re:Why should they bother?

[Anonymous Coward]

I got a simple way to solve it. Cancel all patents on all drugs, and not allow them to be patented. Then they can start working on healing people and not being money hungry apes.

ok, but water and table salt are also dangerous...

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, but nearly everything is toxic in sufficient doses, including water!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6261509. stm

For some perspective, here's an excerpt from the MSDS for table salt:

Sodium Chloride (NaCl) free-flowing powder

Skin Contact: May cause skin irritation.
Skin Absorption: May be harmful if absorbed through the skin.
Eye Contact: Sodium chloride (NaCl) in contact with eyes can
cause irritation or redness due to abrasion.
Inhalation: May be harmful if inhaled. Material may be
irritating to mucous membranes and upper respiratory tract.
Ingestion: May be harmful if swallowed.

http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/catalog/search/Product Detail/FLUKA/50127

but...

[Aurostion]

The drug can be patented in regards to its specific anti-cancer applications or by the mechanism by which it attacks various cancers. Either this guy is wrong, or he's taking a cheap shot.

Ho-hum another cancer cure

[tgibbs]

Every year there are a number of these--compounds that kill cancer cells in a dish, or maybe shrink tumors in an animal model, that are touted in the press as the cure for cancer. And most of them are never heard from again. Sometimes they are just too toxic in man. Or they work in just a tiny subset of patients. Or they make you horribly ill and add only a few weeks onto your survival time. It turns out that killing cancer cells in a dish, or even reducing tumor size in an animal, just isn't all that predictive of efficacy in man. That doesn't mean that every such lead isn't worth pursuing, but it's important to keep a sense of perspective.

Pharmaceutical companies?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who needs them?

http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/catalog/search/Product Detail/ALDRICH/347795

Also available at Fisher, though I dont have the patience to deconstruct their search form into a url...

In other words

[j_w_d]

Patent lawyers nixed because they won't get a cut. The reasoning is beyond specious. If you consider that drug companies insist that patents are necessary to pay back tremendously expensive research, then you hear, "sorry, we can't produce the drug. It'll be too cheap."

The idea that a lack of patent would prvent production is silly. Look at aspirin. It is made competively by any number of drug companies and lack of patents doesn't reduce aspirin's availability.

Re:In other words

[Anonymous Coward]

Patent lawyers nixed because they won't get a cut. "sorry, we can't produce the drug. It'll be too cheap."

And poetic justice would be if they then got cancer.

What about the university?

[Firethorn]

Surely the cure for cancer is worth more than the fiscal stability of a university, right?

I'm not sure that the students and employees of the university would agree with you...

Re:What about the university?

[susano_otter]

I'm not sure that the students and employees of the university would agree with you...

Aye, and there's the rub.

Personal sacrifice for great justice always seems like a great idea, until you're the one being told to make the sacrifice.

Re:What about the university?

[Firethorn]

Which is why I seem to get irate whenever people start complaining about medical companies making a profit when everybody else is. For pete's sake, funeral homes make a profit.

Look at Viox, pharmacuticals take big risks all the time for these new products, of course they need return on them.

If anything the high profits are a signal that there's space in the market for even more companies.

Jackass

[Cadallin]

If'd you actually bothered to read the article on Wikipedia on Insulin, you'd have learned that Frederick Banting was in fact the first person to extract the active agent from the islets of langerhans in the pancreas. He didn't know what it was (insulin was identified as the active ingredient of the extract some time later) but Banting was responsible for developing the first effective treatment for diabetes mellitus and he shared the 1923 Nobel Prize in Medicine for the Discovery of insulin with J. R. Macleod (who identified the insulin molecule as the active ingredient).

Re:Jackass

[thripper]

"Nicolae Paulescu, a professor of physiology at the Romanian School of Medicine, published similar work in 1921 that had been carried out in France. Use of his techniques was patented in Romania, though no clinical use resulted. It has been argued ever since that he is the rightful discoverer." Wikipedia. So, the rusians invented the nuke, right ? Just because this Romanian guy did not make the actual product does not mean he might not be regarded as the inventor. He described the method used by Banting (two years later !) and patented. Banting was to told how to do it. How can this be his ? If it was not patented in America doesn't mean shit. It was patented in Romania. Patent was obtained in 1921, Banting did it in 1923.

let's do it the open source way

[Anonymous Coward]

how many of you would consider donating money to the researchers in order to have a patent-free drug? It could be done the same way as free nvidia pledge http://www.pledgebank.com/nouveaudriver/

Not necessarily

[Colin Smith]

For example, in the UK, the leading funder of research into cancer is a charity...

http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/aboutus/

I have an incentive for this research to be performed. Call it enlightened self interest.

Calling all Geeks - Let's help fight cancer!

[ShawnX]

I want to start a movement to get funds for the research on this chemical/drug. I need help. I'd like to know what people think and if they want to help out how we should do it. I'm sure someone on here has/or is suffering from cancer or knows someone who has cancer.

Let's use our collective community to help rm -rf cancer!

Shawn

Re:Calling all Geeks - Let's help fight cancer!

[abushga]

ShawnX wrote,
>Let's use our collective community to help rm -rf cancer!

Second that.

We can start by donating online to the University of Alberta Cancer Research Fund. Contributions support the continued work of Dr. Michelakis, author of the article in the journal Cancer Cell which kicked off all the fuss. Want to move the process forward? Vote with your credit card.

More information, donor form here: http://www.uofaweb.ualberta.ca/campaign/priorities .cfm?typ=103&id=11&fund=191

so how long

[peektwice]

Not how long till we see the drug in clinical trials or available in the pharmacy, but how long till I start getting spam advertising the new miracle cancer cure...DCA?

Too Late....researchers already applied for patent

[Hirsto]

http://www.wipo.int/pctdb/en/ia.jsp?IA=CA2006/0005 48&LANGUAGE=EN

is this a defense of patents?

[sorak]

As much as I dislike the current way of patent laws, wouldn't this be an example of why patent laws are good? If this drug could be patented, pfizer would have jumped all over it by now.

some things are not curable

[r00t]

Pretty much any chronic viral disease is totally incurable. This obviously includes AIDS. All we can do is slow it down a bit, so that the victim can have more time to spread the disease to other people before he dies.

Apples and Oranges

[r00t]

Lots of things differ: air temperature, school lunches, racial makeup (obviously "sickle cell disease", but way more than that too), pollution, etc.

You even EAT apples and oranges, don't you? We subsist entirely on freedom fries cooked in trans fats.

As always ... FUS, FEU, FUN ... I repeat ...

[OldHawk777]

It is appropriate to say again ... twice in one day on /.

Politics for all Feudal Nations ... as in aristocratic or plutocratic remains the same, nothing changes much in a thousand years more or less.

Let them eat cake and fake their faith with patriotic fervor as they always Fuck US, Fuck EU, and Fuck UN them too.

It is satisfying when you are a big ugly fat fucker on top, but the rape victims on the bottom are just horribly, painfully, and totally screwed.

NOTE: victims=public

!HAVEFUN!

Not unreasonable

[bagsc]

The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA) of 1994 allows companies to sell such a substance after proving only that it has no "significant or unreasonable risk of illness or injury." If they sell it in the indication that it be used in 10 mg pills, and then a study indicates that 100mg is the best dose, then people can just take 10 pills. You don't need a patent to sell something. In other news, thousands of people die from aspirin and acetaminophen misuse each year, but they aren't illegal.

Why not have the Gates Foundation Fund it?

[Anonymous Coward]

If no one stands to profit from it but Humankind then why not have a non profit fund it. The Gates foundation seems like a perfect fit for cases like these.

The problem is the regulations.

[TheNarrator]

This whole situation comes down to the fact that the government would rather see a terminal cancer patient die than see them waste a small amount of money on a possibly ineffective treatment.

You misunderstand "demand"

[Anonymous Coward]

If there was a pill that saved your life, the provider would sell it for whatever you'd be willing to pay for it. In this case, it would be tens of thousands of dollars, and they would make more money by curing you. They have the incentive. There are a lot of very very smart people working on these issues, and it is hard to imagine that someone who swore to the Hippocratic Oath would let an opportunity to save thousands of lives would let it go, or that a businessman who saw an opportunity to make millions of dollars and save thousands of lives wouldn't invest in it. It's just a hard problem.

NIH does fund such studies

[jjo]

The NIH does this very thing; perhaps not nearly enough, but it does happen.

As an example, take age-related macular degeneration (AMD). Genentech has developed and obtained approval for a drug to treat AMD: Lucentis. It's the most effective drug so approved, so it's prodigiously expensive.

It just so happens that Genentech has produced another drug that is very promising for AMD treatment, and is perhaps superior to Lucentis. This drug is Avastin, and it's already approved for colorectal cancer treatment, and is available much more cheaply than Lucentis.

Many doctors are now using Avastin off-label to treat AMD, but until it is officially approved for this purpose, such use will be limited. Genentech has no interest in seeking this approval, since it would replace sales of its very expensive drug (Lucentis) with sales of its much cheaper drug (Avastin).

This frustrating situation would likely continue until these drugs' patents expired, but it is of such importance to public health that the National Eye Institute (NEI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has funded a study to compare Avastin and Lucentis. So it is possible, if not very often, for government funding to solve these problems.

Uhhh, we VASTLY outspend Canada

[Ogemaniac]

on publically-funded medical R&D. Canada's public medical R&D spending is around two billion Canadian dollars per year. The US's NIH spends nearly twenty times that alone. Accounting for the fact that we have about eight times the population, we beat the Canucks two and a half times over. Also, NIH is not the only source of public medical R&D, and our private sector whips theirs as well.

Laetrile?

[GrpA]

Sounds just like the old stories about Laetrile...

A chemical (related to Cyanide) that is found naturally occuring in many foods.

Regardless of what was said, I had a very close relative use Laetrile and watched an untreatable cancer disappear over several months. I was stunned when the hospital refused to treat her later, and a nurse told her that the hospital was concerned that if it did tests and found no cancer, she might claim that she had been cured by natural medicines.

More recently a good friend trying to obtain supplies (through apricot kernels) for his dying mother was forced to sign a contract that the kernels would not be used to treat cancer...

I wouldn't be suprised if not being able to research this new drug is the least of the researchers problems. In the long run, if the drug is even rumoured to be effective, any means of producing it will likely be restricted as well.

If Vitamin C was patentable, oranges would no doubt be illegal,

GrpA.

Re:Laetrile?

[Grimwiz]

quick, post their case history to refute sites such as:

http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/ Cancer/laetrile.html

god, sicknening..

[Anonymous Coward]

"A small, non-toxic molecule may soon be available as an inexpensive treatment for many forms of cancer, including lung, breast and brain tumours, say University of Alberta

But there's a catch: the drug isn't patented, and pharmaceutical companies may not be interested in funding further research if the treatment won't make them a profit."

yeah make money and monolopies of peoples illness.. well folks go figure because that makes me sick, you know what that means - profits!

What About..

[Xybot]

...Allowing anybody with terminal cancer to be prescribed this drug as long as they sign a waiver against side effects or other health consequences and agree to participate in a scientific study of health effects. The drug is already in production, and has passed FDA approval (albiet for a different condition). Believe me a person who is suffering from terminal cancer wouldn't even think twice about accepting this, what's their alternative?

If I ever get cancer now I know what to do.

[gd23ka]

You're right. Dichloroacetate is already used to treat lactic acidosis (buildup of lactic acid in the body.
The day I find out I have cancer is the day I will be taking that drug no matter whether that cheats
the industry out of a hundred thousand dollars and the Club of Rome out of another welcome premature death.
There will be a doctor that will prescribe it, they're used to being bribed.

If I were a scientist

[Travoltus]

I'd develop a cure first, and then worry about money later. Because scientists and corporate CEOs get cancer, too. So can I. The fact that this cancer drug isn't being developed is a detriment to capitalists and communists alike.

Now, while you're chewing on that, allow me to introduce you to an age old, time tested and proven fact: necessity is the mother of invention, not profits. One can imagine where humanity would be if Ooga Booga had waited for patents and profits to come in before inventing the wheel.

People invent things whether or not profit is involved. See: the open source movement.

I now return you to your profits before people wet dream.

Re:If I were a scientist

[susano_otter]

You misunderstand my point.

First of all, I deplore "profits before people"--or I would if I wasn't just as guilty of putting my own wants and needs ahead of others' as everybody else is.

My point here is that I don't understand the hypocrisy on display, and I don't understand how you can reconcile your insistence that somebody else, somewhere else, should put people before profits, with your own insistence that because you're not a scientist, you're somehow exempt from this judgement that people should come before profits.

I mean, you don't have to be a scientist to help them in their work. You yourself admit that everybody can get cancer, so everybody shoulde have a personal motive for working on a cure. However, you yourself are not actually working on a cure; rather, you're continuing to insist that if you were somebody else somewhere else, you'd totally work on a cure for cancer.

Why not help out as who you are, where you are?

Re:If I were a scientist

[Travoltus]

I can't contribute to working on a cure because I'm not a scientist. You can't help cancer research if you're not a scientist. What part of that are you not getting? I help fund them by donating to cancer based charities, but I can't do any meaningful research.

We should not, however, have to beg cancer research charity money while Halliburton gets multibillion dollar no-bid military contracts and airlines get taxpayer funded bankruptcy bailouts.

Is it possible for your argument to be any further off base?

Re:If I were a scientist

[susano_otter]

I help fund them by donating to cancer based charities,

That's all you had to say, actually.

I never said you should engage in scientific research yourself. But there's always more to it than just the guy in the white lab coat fiddling with test tubes.

For example, much science today depends on computers. If you know a lot about computers, or have a lot of experience with computer support, you could donate your time to a research facility.

Or you could, as you say you do, work very hard at whatever it is you're good at, and then donate your profits to research organizations.

My argument is this: If we say that someone else, somewhere else (e.g., a big pharma CEO) should give more of his own resources to cure cancer, then we have to say the same thing about ourselves, because it's hypocritical to demand sacrifices from somone else for a cause we believe in without demanding the same sacrifices from ourselves.

So how much are you really sacrificing--not just donating your surplus wealth, but actually downgrading your lifestyle by sacrificing non-surplus wealth--for the cause you believe in? And how much moral superiority does your sacrifice actually buy you?

Pretending I'm a pharmaceutical company...

[Viceroy Potatohead]

...I'd get some opinions on the likely success of this by some of my better scientists, and if they thought it was pretty promising, I'd go to the big health-care insurance companies, and make a deal. "If we develop this, and it works, we want you to provide insurance coverage exclusively for our brand for 5 years at X price. Just sign here..."

Maybe some anti-competitive laws would be broken there, I don't know. But if not, you'd have a pharmaceutical company taking an intelligent risk on something that could pay out big for a few years, and as the insurance companies, you'd be taking very little risk, since failure doesn't cost anything, and success would only lower your costs of treatment, especially in the long term. I guess the question would be: would the costs of testing and approval be offset by that 5 year profitability.

Re:If I ever get cancer now I know what to do.

[arminw]

......There will be a doctor that will prescribe it, they're used to being bribed.........

The article stated that this stuff is available in chemical stores. This would mean that a doctor is not needed. Someone with terminal cancer would likely not care what rules any government might invent. After all what does such a person have to lose?

Blame interventionism, not capitalism

[GreedyCapitalist]

The problem is that drug approval costs so much. The major drug companies are happy with this - a billion dollars is too much for any innovative new startups to get to market. This is not the fault of capitalism, but the opposite - of government interventionism. If a free market, competing private organizations would decide when products are safe, and consumer would be free to choose what risks to take. In the meantime, the FDA creates giant monopolies that exclude competition by lobbying the govt for more regulations and "safety controls" while millions of people die because innovative new medicines and treatments never had a chance.

Cytotec used off label causes c-section ruptures

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misoprostol is a drug designed to treat ulcers. Doctors use it under the name cytotec to induce labor, cause abortions. It causes massive muscle contractions and is responsible for sometimes causing women who've had a c-section to actually rupture giving birth - their previous c-section scar tears open. Even with all the danger it's still used in about 1/3 of all births in the us because doctors can schedule babies to be delivered when it's convenient, instead of when they're ready.

Corporations make money, don't save lives

[Anonymous Coward]

This should enlight some market nazis.

Corporation's only worry IS to make money. They don't *try* to help society, save lives, make us safer or more confortable. They only do this indirectly, as a byproduct of the money-making activity.

It is OUR responsibility to do the right thing, and don't rely on the market for things it cannot do.

Let the market make money and people save lives.

Up to a point (differs by province)

[Rob Simpson]

In BC everyone has a deductible based on income... for non-seniors who make >$30000/year, when drug costs reach 3% of annual income Pharmacare pays 70%, and when at 4% of annual income Pharmacare pays 100%. (For people on expensive and long-term treatments, there is the option to spread out the deductible cost over the year.) Many "average" people with diabetes or high blood pressure will receive at least some coverage.

Even someone who makes six figures may get their drugs paid for if they are on extremely expensive treatments. There are also other types of coverage, such as pallative and mental health, which will pay 100% with no deductible needed for specific drugs.

Re:Up to a point (differs by province)

[dryeo]

Well that is interesting, especially that being a BC resident I had never heard this. Seems you are right though (https://pharmacare.moh.hnet.bc.ca/).
Now to register.

bullshit

[oohshiny]

In the case of DCA, if DCA is a cheap and inexpensive way of treating cancers, then medical insurance and HMOs will have an economic incentive in developing it further because it saves them money.

Even if there is no economic incentive for drug companies or HMOs to develop a drug like DCA, it can always be tested and approved based on tax-payer funded trials--in the end, that will save the tax payers a lot of money compared to having the drug patented and sold at a premium. Furthermore, often, such drugs somehow manage to get used even without approval through various programs and channels.

I have my doubts that DCA is the miracle drug the article suggests, but if it is, it's a good thing that it isn't patented: more people will be able to use it and it will cost less.

Patent funded research

[Per Abrahamsen]

The problem is that we relies on indirect funding of the research through the patent system, which screws the entire systems into focusing patentable treatments, starving out other treatments such as new uses of existing drugs, life style changes, or physical therapy.

The solution is to cut out the middle man, and let health insurance companies finance the research directly rather than through inflated medicine prices (which also cause some to choose an inferior product or no treatment, even if they could easily afford to pay the production cost (plus profit) of the medicine). It would be easier than you think, as most of the world have public (tax-funded) health care. Even US has a large tax-funded health care program.

The medicine industry would then just be concerned for manufacture, not research. Research would be public, and more efficient as preliminary results could be shared with other researchers, unlike now where you can't share anything until the final patent application is done.

Not exactly

[Rob Simpson]

Drug companies could easily afford to sell their meds for less than Canadian prices if they slashed their marketing budgets. The price differences aren't that huge... More importantly, Canadian provincial plans will pay for the cost of the generic drug whose patent has expired, or a new type of drug which has been proven more effective, but if you want an evergreened version that costs three times as much because of the "Type R" sticker slapped on it - you can pay for it.

Lowest Cost Alternative

Also, consider this from JAMA: "None of the first-line treatment strategies-blockers, angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors, calcium channel blockers (CCBs), -blockers, and angiotensin receptor blockerswas significantly better than low-dose diuretics for any outcome."

The diuretics they refer to cost about a penny per pill. Some of the other treatments cost more than a dollar per pill.

Re:Not exactly

[maxume]

I don't think that the financial are that clear. The drug companies have a pretty good idea of what they are spending/what they are receiving and I naively believe that if advertising was costing them money, they would stop. At that point you have to balance the benefits of treating more people with the increased cost of each treatment, and it is going to be very difficult to figure things out.

Regarding the JAMA stuff, does the Canadian health care system mostly use diuretics? It is unfortunate that the study does not include side effects; many people would quickly take 9 (projected) good years over 10 okay years(those numbers are out of my ass). If it doesn't, is it because of drug company bluster, or are the therapeutic outcomes better with the more expensive drugs?

I'm not delusional, I don't think that the drug companies act like princes, but I also don't think that they are the evil money fountains some people would seem to like them to be.

Re:Not exactly

[Rob Simpson]

Often people will require more than one type of drug, but low-dose diuretics are a common first-line treatment. At 12.5 to 25mg of hydrochlorothiazide, the most common diuretic, side effects tend to be milder than other drugs like beta-blockers (fatigue...it blocks the same receptors that adrenalin stimulates), ACE inhibitors (dry cough in ~10%), and calcium channel blockers (gingival hyperplasia, constipation, peripheral edema, etc.) No drug is for everyone - all can cause adverse effects or be contraindicated in some cases.

Partly it may be due to the fact that the newer drugs have a more obvious effect on blood pressure, even though this reduction is not proportional to the reduced risk of heart attack and stroke. (The old non-XL Adalat caused a sudden drop of blood pressure, resulting in a rebound effect and increased mortality. Alpha-blockers and atenolol have been found to be substantially worse than other treatments at the same level of BP reduction.)

Also, a lot of it has to do with all the free samples doctors receive for giving to patients. Guess which ones the drug reps are always talking about and handing out boxes of? Of course, if everyone else is doing it, then they can't just stop or they'll lose market share...

What?

[Rob Simpson]

The NIH spends less than $30 billion per year, not all of which is for medical life-sciences research, so I'm not sure about your math. I guess spending more than Canada's total medical research budget on bioterrorism research alone is quite an accomplishment. Personally, I think both countries underfund medical research, and I agree with this guy

Honest Profit

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone could compete to produce the stuff at an honest profit. That would be the famous market efficiency. Drug companies want a licence to print money that is out of proportion to investment. The solution is to remove the broken patent system and restore capitalist competition.

An alternative to pharmaceutical patents

[Christian Engstrom]

This just in: developing medecines takes work, and work costs resources. Anybody who can think of a better way to provide resources to the people interested in developing medecines, besides patent royalties and the like, please come forward.

I'll be happy to.

The Swedish Pirate Party has a proposal for an alternative to pharmaceutical patents. The proposed system has the potential to cut the European governments' spending on drugs in half, while still giving more money to pharmaceutical research.

As an extra bonus, we (the developed world) would no longer have to insist that millions of poor people in third world countries die of preventable causes, just to keep the profit margins high enough for the big pharma companies. This is in effect what we're doing today, through the patent system.

Please feel free to have a look at the proposal. Your comments will be welcome.

Christian Engström
Vice chairman, The Pirate Party (Sweden)

So we spent $151 on Iraq?

[Ogemaniac]

Chump change compared to Social Security! Think of all the good things we could have spent THAT money on!

Uhhh,.,,,,

[Ogemaniac]

So insurance companies should do research? Well, they don't have the expertise. Guess they will have to partner with our buy out the pharmaceutical companies, who do. All you are suggesting is a bunch of horizontal mergers.

REALLY?

[Nafeasonto]

Funding or not, this means many people's lives. This is sick. Really is sick. The love of money is the root of all sort of injurious things, and this is one of them. So because they are not going to make millions off of this job, let's not care? Just so mad I can't think of a sound argument.

One correction

[Andy Dodd]

I should have said discoverer of insulin. It was discovered, not invented.

I had my mind focused too much on the subsequent developments, which WERE invention as opposed to discovery.

Charities

[Anonymous Coward]

Cancer research gets a *lot* of charity money. I bet the people who give to those charities would be very angry about a situation like this. If those charity donations ever do help to find a treatment that ends up on the market, you can be sure the pharma companies won't make it any cheaper, despite all the money donated to help find it.

Isn't this why we have governments?

[LikeTheSearchEngine]

You know, to fund necessary things for the public good?

No profit in it, but that's why we pay taxes. So the government can do something that doesn't turn a huge profit.

How to work around this

[roguegramma]

It is easy for companies to work around this - just invent a combined concoction of unpatented medicine A with patented medicine B and show that it is effective in trials, then distribute it being under protection.

Nope.

[Grendel Drago]

Off-label use is quite legal. Botox is actually approved for treating muscle spasms, and gabapentin for seizures, but they're mostly used for treatment of wrinkliness and neuropathy. The only restrictions appear to be (a) the drug company can't market it for off-label use, and (b) you can't prescribe opiates off-label. Both of which seem pretty reasonable to me.

Note the part about how cheap Medicare is.

[Grendel Drago]

Also note the 2% overhead (I've seen it quoted as anywhere from 1% to "under 4%") for Medicare. Insurance programs don't need to be that bloated; it's just that we have a grotesquely parasitic industry here. Of course, we'd rather pay half again what our healthcare should cost so that at least we're not socialists. Grump, grump, etc.

Quackery.

[Grendel Drago]

Yes, but the benefit of this particular research is that it's actual science, while "BarleyGreen" is quackery. And while some argue that it's essentially harmless and might give people hope, quackery kills people. Take that shit somewhere else.

Programs like that exist.

[Grendel Drago]

The FDA awards grants for "Orphan Product Research", research on "drugs and devices for small patient populations". Dichloroacetate was one of the drugs thus studied, in this case for congenital lactic acidosis, which while I'm sure it's unpleasant, isn't the sort of thing major pharma companies throw heaps of money after. Thanks for this development should also go to P.W. Stacpoole, who (according the the bibliography in the Cancer Cell article) has been publishing papers on the pharmacology, safety and effectiveness of DCA since 1988.

The Orphan Product Research Program has, according to the website, approved 40 new products for rare diseases. It's sponsored a staggering list of clinical trials, on an annual budget of around $13 million.

So, the system, in this instance, worked. Should anyone ever consider dissolving the program, you can roll up a copy of that list and bash them over the head with it like a naughty puppy.

Re:Apples and Hydrogen

[Dr Caleb]

Ahh, see - we can't eat the freedom fries, because the heat from the deep friers melts our igloos. We just eat the fat from the baby seals we kill.

Don't count on college grant money.

[Grendel Drago]

Research grants all too often turn into corporate welfare programs. While the research is publically funded, the results are privately owned, and milked for every last possible cent. Read about the Bayh-Dole Act; there's some good commentary here which says what I'd say if I were more eloquent.

What's the sell?

[Grendel Drago]

Why would anyone buy the patented combination when the unpatented one is as safe and effective? Remember, DCA is FDA-approved for safety, and can be prescribed "off-label" to just about anyone. There may be instances in which that sort of thing will fly--the shameful listing of Marinol on DEA schedule III, while the same drug without the inactive ingredient of sesame oil is schedule I--but the cat's out of the bag on this one, I think.

They do that.

[Grendel Drago]

The FDA has an orphan products grant program, which conducts clinical trials on drugs which would be overlooked by for-profit companies. Interestingly, two grants were given for researching dichloroacetate (see the "Previous Grants" page).

Why wouldn't you?

[Grendel Drago]

There is a 'grey' solution of "off label" prescribing but I'm not sure you'd want to do that with a cancer drug.

Why on earth not? It's safer than a lot of drugs--the side effects appear to be pain, numbness and gait disturbance, though problems appear at higher dosages and longer timelines (patients were unable to complete three years of treatment in one instance; on the other hand, the drug in rodent trials was effective in a matter of weeks). Cancer patients put up with hair loss, immunosuppression, and a panoply of other side effects from their drugs. I would think that the severity of cancer would make this option more attractive, not less.

Re:Why wouldn't you?

[dbrutus]

If it were a problem like dermititis, a failed application causes a bit of discomfort and then you move on. But wasting time with a cancer drug is risking a life and the legal implications are pretty stark, at least in the US. Imagine what happens if you set the dosage too low. Or maybe there's a strange effect at extremely high doses that enhances, not eliminates certain cancers. You don't want to either blindly overshoot or undershoot when you're treating a deadly disease.

Indeed. Good luck with your chemistry!

[Grendel Drago]

Indeedy. Remember, the specific gravity is 1.57, and the effective dose is 12.5 mg/kg, twice daily. Also, it's corrosive, so dilute it heavily with water. Probably best to mix up a large batch to ensure uniform dosage.

Of course, you could drop dead from this, and long-term (meaning years) use is associated with toxic peripheral neuropathy in at least one study. But hey, if you've got cancer, it's probably not your biggest concern. Might want to at least ask your doctor first.

Re:Indeed. Good luck with your chemistry!

[Anonymous Coward]

Given that the article originates in Canada (British Commonwealth member), what they call a "chemistry store" is probably what Americans call a "pharmacy" (e.g. "you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's..."). In which case, the substance is already in a form measured for human consumption.

Re:Indeed. Good luck with your chemistry!

[Rich0]

Uh, considering that pharma manufacturers have trouble making sterile injections correctly, I'd be pretty hesitant to just whip up a batch in my bathtub.

Companies often end up flushing thousands of gallons of product into the sewer as a result of failed quality tests. All it takes is one bacterium to ruin a batch.

Pills are pretty easy to make comparatively-speaking, although lots of stuff can still go wrong. Injections are a different story - if you whip one up in your kitchen you'll be experimenting with civil-war medicine...

It's not really a barrier.

[Grendel Drago]

Not really. Botox is approved for muscle spasms, and gabapentin for seizures. The vast majority of uses are off-label; it doesn't seem to have stopped doctors from prescribing the drugs. While I'm sure there are liability concerns, I don't think they're the barrier you make them out to be for prescribing drugs off-label.

Indeed we do, and it shows.

[Grendel Drago]

The efficacy of dichloroacetate was studied in the FDA's orphan product research program. Two clinical trials were performed on the drug; here's the complete list. The Canadians did a good thing, but they are standing on the Americans' shoulders.

That's not necessarily the case.

[Grendel Drago]

Except that the pioneering work was done in Canada.

That's arguable, seeing as how the initial studies on the drug (for lactic acidosis) were performed on an FDA grant program for drugs to treat rare diseases. On the plus side, the drug is indeed not patented and not patentable. I'm sure pharma companies will be happy to patent variants, but so long as we can get the original stuff on the cheap, who cares?

I really can't see it.

[Grendel Drago]

The drug can be put in human-consumable form using nothing but a reasonably priced bottle of reagent, a graduated cylinder and some water. (It's corrosize when undiluted.) All of those are freely available. How exactly are pharma companies going to convince people to pay them umpty-jillion dollars for the same substance in pill form?

You could get it prescribed right now.

[Grendel Drago]

You don't need efficacy studies, either. You can get a doctor to prescribe it to you off-label, right now. It's common practice with, for instance, gabapentin. It's already known to be safe; that's all that's required for doctors to prescribe it.

Manhattan Projects are bad metaphors.

[Grendel Drago]

You know, Manhattan Project-style efforts have their uses, but I don't know that they're the solution to everything. (Hilariously, you can read a Time article from 1958 making some of the same criticisms we're seeing in this discussion.) As Von Braun said, crash programs are based on the assumption that if you put nine women on the job, you can make a baby in one month. In certain cases, this is so, but heavily applied research isn't the right tool for every job.

For instance, a good solution for growing fuel would be a rolling prize in the style of the Methuselah Mouse Prize for the greatest net energy extracted from one acre of land, taking all inputs (equipment fuel, fertilizers, etc) into account. If the problems to be solved are vague and the methods unknown, might prize incentives work better than crash programs?

Now, that method doesn't really apply to the problem of orphan drugs, or drugs which may not be commercially viable but nevertheless might have strongly beneficial effects. The FDA has an orphan-drugs program (which, incidentally, did safety research on dichloroacetate a few years ago to treat some rare diseases) which does that kind of thing. An entirely new plan of attack against a disease (like this one, for instance) is far more valuable medically than yet another COX-2 inhibitor. If you want more drugs which might not be commercially viable, I'd start there; while the orphan drugs program funds only clinical trials for drugs to treat rare diseases, you might look into developing vaccines (expensive and unprofitable), or cures, rather than temporary treatments, for common conditions.

I suppose I'm nitpicking, as a "Manhattan Project" generally refers to a large, concerted effort of any kind, not just a crash research program. John Edwards's ending-poverty proposal isn't a crash research program, but it is a large and concerted effort. At least someone's talking about that sort of thing.

How did you get this idea?

[Grendel Drago]

Well, then, it should be easy for you to provide a list of drug discoveries that came from government funding. But even if you could (and you can't b/c it's not true) that's not due to socialism.

Oh, lawdy.

The drug in question was originally developed and tested on an FDA orphan products grant. Anticancer drug Taxol was brought to market as a result of a 1958 National Cancer Institute study which (via the USDA) tested 30,000 plants for possible anticancer properties. AZT, ddI, ddC, d4T, Ziagen and Norvir (AIDS drugs) were developed on government money. Avastin (anticancer drug) was developed on an NIH grant. The list goes on.

How did you get the idea that government-funded science never produces anything of value? Haven't you even heard of the Manhattan Project?

That's correct. The free market *HAS* failed -- the government is interfering by their over-regulation. Thank the FDA and trial attorneys for making new drug development so cost-prohibitive.

So, you think that the FDA was over-regulating when it refused to approve thalidomide?

That's just ridiculous.

[Grendel Drago]

Yes, because porky boondoggles in construction have sweet fuck-all do with government-funded research.

Please consider that government-funded research has given us the atomic bomb (not saying it's good, but it was certainly a breakthrough), Taxol, most AIDS drugs, a staggering amount of agricultural research through the USDA, the goddamned internet, the World Wide Web (Tim Berners-Lee worked for CERN, which is government-run) and innumerable other benefits. To claim that you can't think of anything public-funded research has led to shows a stunning lack of knowledge or curiosity on your part.

racial makeup?

[themusicgod1]

What exactly do you mean by "racial makeup"?

Re:racial makeup?

[r00t]

I mean the portions of various races in the population. (a break-down by percentage for example)

Heart disease is more common in black people. People descended from various Jewish groups in Eastern Europe get all sorts of genetic diseases that kill them in early childhood. People with American Indian ancenstory, including Mexicans, are vulnerable to diabetes.

That's just off the top of my head, and not even counting various lifestyle risks.

At least get the name right.

[Grendel Drago]

That's the Food and Drug Administration, and if you want to know why that barrier to entry is in place, please read The Jungle and look up "thalidomide".

They go together when it comes to medicine.

[jotaeleemeese]

Cubans live longer and better lifes than USians, have an estimated 5000 "health tourists" a year (and growing) that bring to the belaguered country an estimated amount of $50 000 000/year.

There are plenty of airlines from many other countries flying to Cuba, so distirbution of the drug is a non issue.

The point is that Cuba ....

[jotaeleemeese]

.... is a leading country when it comes to medical care and research.

You are trying to muddle the waters regarding that fact with other unrelated facts, which may be true, but are irrelevant to the discussion we are having.

We should all die of cancer in the free market.

[Grendel Drago]

But more than that, companies have significant incentives not to waste money. Government has no such motivation, as history has shown. Too much spending will kill a company, while too much government spending will keep a segment of the government alive.

What was the overhead of private insurance, compared to the overhead of Medicare? Ah, yes, it was between six and ten times as much. Lovely free-market efficiency, there. I'll run right out and privatize Medicare.

Drugs are one of those products that are priced on what will be most profitable for the drug companies. Even if they take more losses that year, they can't just raise their prices, or they will end up losing money.

Oh, that's rich. Please do some reading about Bristol Myers Squibb's pricing of Taxol, where they essentially made up a price. You've got cancer, you want to be not dead, you'll pay them whatever they ask. This, despite that the research on the drug was largely performed by the NIH.

So your Wonderful! Free! Market! Solution! to this problem is if people don't want to pay the extortionate rates that BMS was charging, they should just not take the drugs, and die. Then, BMS will realize that they want to lower their prices a bit, until they hit their sweet spot of maximum profit. And all you have is a stack of corpses to show for it, which, really, is a small sacrifice to make on the altar of the Wonderful! Free! Market!, right?

What free-marketeers like yourself conveniently leave out is that free markets maximize one thing--profit. If your goal is to maximize BMS's profit, it's an excellent method. On the other hand, if your goal is the well-being of cancer patients, the free market can and does fail. While in many instances the well-being of cancer patients is highly correlated with BMS's fortunes, they are by no means synonymous. To pretend they are is naivete at best, outright lying at worst.

Re:We should all die of cancer in the free market.

[evilviper]

What socialists like yourself conveniently leave out is that companies are quite effecient at many things.

Becasue Cuba has a track record in the field.

[jotaeleemeese]

Which is recognized internationally.

Re:Becasue Cuba has a track record in the field.

[khallow]

Oh yes. Which is "recognized internationally". Like India, China, and a dozen other countries.

Please move to Somalia.

[Grendel Drago]

Ah, so you wish to live free of governmental interference, without its baleful boot on your neck? Perhaps you'd enjoy a brief jaunt to Somalia, where there is effectively no government. Sure, there are bands of armed thugs roaming the streets, but I'm sure you can think of a free market solution to that, as you'll be freer than any American, being that the existence of government programs of any sort is tantamount to totalitarianism.

Interesting. Examples?

[Grendel Drago]

What are some of the drugs that the Cuban research program has developed? What common diseases have cured that were previously too expensive to treat in vast numbers of people?

Oh, piss off.

[Grendel Drago]

Wait, we're counting anecdotal evidence now? Well, I cured my cancer by drinking magic homeopathic Asahara bathwater!

Look, Laetrile is quackery. There's no evidence that it works. Anecdotal evidence simply isn't reliable in this regard. It is completely unrelated to the present case. Laetrile wasn't shown to affect human tumors in vitro; it wasn't shown to affect rodent tumors in vivo. DCA was. There's reason to think DCA may be effective against some cancers in humans; there's no reason to think Laetrile is.

Suggestions.

[Grendel Drago]

Indeed, this looks to be a potentially exciting area. The next stage would likely be efficacy trials on actual people, as safety trials have already been performed. So you'd want to look into contacting people like the NIH, OneWorld Health, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Canadian equivalent of the NIH, and nudging them about clinical studies of this drug in people with cancer. On a more local level, if you're near a medical research facility, especially part of a university, go and half a talk with whoever does oncology research, and ask what they think, and what you can do to drum up interest in a human clinical study.

How far we've fallen.

[Grendel Drago]

So, we've gone from government can do no right, while corporations can do no wrong, to "companies are quite efficient at many things". I left that out? Absolutely not--I practically said that explicitly when I said "If your goal is to maximize BMS's profit, [the free market is] an excellent method." Corporations are very efficient at growth and profit. There are, however, situations in which we don't want to optimize for maximum corporate profits. There are situations, and I submit to you that the subject of this article is one, where a corporation in the free market isn't the best tool, because maximum corporate profits don't correlate well with the good we seek.

Think of it this way. You have two hands. In your left hand, you have collective, top-down action: government-funded basic research, the GI bill, Mac OSX. In your right hand, you have individual, competitive action: industry, the marketplace of ideas, peer-reviewed science, Debian Linux. Ayn Rand wants me to amputate my left hand; Karl Marx wants me to amputate my right hand. Is it so radical, so unthinkable to ask that we use different tools to solve different problems?

Big F'ing Deal!

[Anonymous Coward]

Big F'ing Deal! We already have plenty of cures for cancer, and there are plenty of addictive drugs for the health industry to push on suckers, pretending that they will make them healthier.

What we need is either an FDA that does not benefit from making people sick, or no FDA at all. I think the second is more likely.

This is why pharmaceutical drugs should not be

[theguyfromsaturn]

patentable. Drug companies are not interested in cures anyway, they are interested in "treatments". AIDS is a real panacea for them.... they won't cure you, but you need a cocktail to keep on going. That's a lot of patents and money for them on one disease. Real research on cures can only come from universities and government funded research, because disease is a financial weight on the economy of a country (either because access to drugs is subsidized or because of lack of income and hospitalization costs of its citizens, or more likely a combination of both). There is an intrinsic conflict of interest in allowing research to be done by pharmaceutical companies. Their job should be merely to produce drugs. Let the research be handled by those for whom it is economically advantageous to eradicate the disease, not prolong it in an eternal drug-dependent life-style. Much has been said about software patents on slashdot, but pharmaceutical patents are also non-desirable patents.

It's not an injection.

[Grendel Drago]

The drug can be ingested through drinking a water solution. In the study with rats, the rats drank the drug in their water supply. No injections required.

Re:It's not an injection.

[Rich0]

While that definitely helps alleviate the risk, might I suggest that you're better off buying this in a formulation that was designed and tested to be suitable for human consumption...?

Re:It's not an injection.

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone know where I can get it? My mom has terminal breast/bone/brain cancer and has been given 3-4 months so we're willing to try this. I'm very serious. Thanks.