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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."
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?
I thought the United States had the monopoly on horridly broken patent systems.
+++ATH0
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.
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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.
Have you read my journal today?
"curing" an ailment isn't anywhere near as profitable as "treating" an ailment...
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.
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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.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
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.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
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.
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
Government funded research.
A lot of people on Slashdot may disagree with this, but the "free market" is not the solution to everything.
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.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
When the free market fails, as in this case, why not let government do it? Most major scientific breakthroughs have come from government funding.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
here
-mcgrew (my computer is broken):
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.
...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.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
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.
"When Nature Calls We All Shall Drown" Johan Edlund
>...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?
1. Find a plant, animal, or mineral with it. /yes, I found the mysterious step 2.
2. Market it as a natural supplement.
3. Profit!
This tagline is copyrighted material. Please send $10 for an affordable replacement.
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.
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.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
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...
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
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.
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...
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
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.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
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.
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.
...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.
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!!!
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.
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.
Yes it does. And that system is cheaper per capita, and results in Canadians having a 1.5 year longer average lifespan.
n _health_care_systems_compared
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_and_America
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
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.
The pursuit of absolute tolerance leads to the most rigorous and ludicrous intolerance. - REX MURPHY
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.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
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).
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.
...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?
God was my co-pilot, but then we crashed and I was forced to eat him.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
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.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca