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16-Year-Old Discovers Potential Treatment For Cystic Fibrosis
Bob the Super Hamste writes "According to a story at LiveScience, a 16-year-old Canadian 11th grade student has discovered a possible treatment for cystic fibrosis. The treatment is a combination of two drugs which, in a computer simulation on the Canadian SCINET supercomputing network, did not interfere with each other while interacting with the defective protein responsible for the disorder. He has also tested the drug combination on living cells with results that 'exceeded his expectations.'"
n/t
My money is on him winning the fair and then selling the rights to it to a Pharmaceutical, never to be heard from again.
He has also tested the drug combination on living cells with results that 'exceeded his expectations.'
This may or may not be impressive depending on what his expectations were. Hopefully they were higher than "causes massive trauma to healthy tissue," where "causes significant trauma to healthy tissue" would exceed expectations.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Yes, if its one thing they are know for is not providing new drugs.
Idiot.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Nah. Some kid who tested 6 different denture adhesives in Coke will win because the judges actually understand WTF he did. At least that's how it worked at science fairs when I was in school.
I don't know, I heard some kids at the same fair got a pig and an elephant to make love.
I hope it is a usable treatment. Sounds like an extremely smart young man, his parents must be very proud.
as Big Pharm sues him for using their drugs in a manner not properly prescribed. This will effectively lock him down while they rebrand the drugs, package them, and patent the cure for their profit.
that exceed my expectations (e.g. getting up before noon today). Why don't you write about me ?
Jerry Lewis is MS not Cystic Fibrosis.
16 years old and the kid is doing drug trials? Back when I was in school we had to share Bunsen burners because there wasn't enough to go around.
I read the internet for the articles.
Um, no. Jerry Lewis = MS, not CF.
The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit.
His 'mentor' probably spoon fed him everything, and the media is surely over-hyping the importance and effectiveness of this. My money is on us never hearing another peep about this 'breakthrough' ever again.
As a 34 year old dealing with the health issues and the ridiculous costs that let me breathe, digest my food, and not be knocked on my butt by blood sugar spikes, I'm excited by this. Goes to show that sometimes we just need some fresh thought at a new problem - the traditional, mega-millions research methods may not be the answer. (similar to Space-X :: NASA)
The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit.
Perhaps slightly offtopic, but reading this story i can't help but wonder why supercomputer systems such as these aren't being used to just 'randomly' try combinations of existing drugs against various known conditions ?
Obviously the kid here seems to have stumbled onto something great, and i certainly don't mean to dismiss that, but 2 existing drugs "fixing" a disease the article claims is one of the [10 Worst Hereditary Conditions], kinda makes me think that a simple script trying combinations of drugs against significant diseases on the very same supercomputer would have found this (and potentially hundreds of similar cases) in no time.
as TFA does not contain much. Just some extremely vague, general text. I understand it is for "the masses" but I'd prefer information that some might have trouble understanding instead of the no information that is easy to understand...
Um, no. Jerry Lewis = MS, not CF.
I can't figure out what Jerry Lewis has to do with Microsoft, nor why you're bringing up compact flash in relation to either of them.
That's right. They mostly try to tack on a new chlorine atom to decades-old drugs so they can keep patents going.
Who appears to do this sorta thing professionally. The 16 year old should be given a BIG pat on the back for contacting a LONG list of scientists to find one that would work with him. Unfortunately, the news industry really likes to play up the whole "Kid Genius" story, since it make all of us feel old, and useless. :)
I assume they produce slower Terminators. "Com with me if you want to live eh."
Foot placed squarely in mouth since 1983.
I've lost a few members of my family to this disease, so if they come out with a treatment for this it'd be fantastic.
...no one can agree whether or not the theory of evolution is valid.
(In defense of the States, there's no real evidence of evolution to be found within their borders)
Beating out "an 18 year-old [who] discover[ed] a particularly beneficial strain of bacteria from a traditional lacto-fermented food found in a less developed society, and a 16 year-old [who] show[ed] how to harness the natural adaptive intelligence of the human body during pregnancy", the second place prize went to "a novel way for vegans to eat dessert."
The team that came second invented a better way to make sorbet. Not to diminish their achievement in the advancement of humanity in the field of frozen desserts but I would feel a little outdone.
Try MD.
They are known for providing profitable drugs, and suppressing unprofitable drugs, or more accurately, drugs that interfere with the profitability of other drugs. For example, a drug that treats the symptoms of a disease, and needs to be taken for the duration of the patient's lifetime, would likely be a profitable drug. A drug that cures the disease with a single dose, while perhaps somewhat profitable on its own, would be devastating to the profitability of the first drug, and would therefore be a candidate for suppression.
In this particular case, however, the treatment involves the use of two existing drugs, so there's really no profitability to discuss.
Nah. Some kid who tested 6 different denture adhesives in Coke will win because the judges actually understand WTF he did. At least that's how it worked at science fairs when I was in school.
You probably should have learned how to explain your volcano better.
Fix Your Own TV - RiddledTV.com Avoid the Landfill
Now imagine how much more awesome it would be if academic journals weren't $20k a year.
Idiot.
The poster implied that he would sell the rights to a pharma company and indeed licensing compounds from smaller companies/research labs is indeed standard practice. If you meant that the pharma companies don't have enough new drugs of their own, this is in fact wrong.
The second part of the post implied the kid would never be heard from again. If he made enough money it's possible. I'm guessing you misinterpreted this as a statement the company would buy his compound and it would never see the light of day, thus garnering your idiot comment. While it's not what he meant, it is in fact also common practice in pharma for companies to license the rights to compounds similar to those they are developing just to eliminate potential competition. It's why often when licensing a compound stipulations are added that the purchasing company must intend to develop it.
All of this is likely moot as the kid does not own the rights to the compounds. TFA doesn't specify whether they are novel but my guess would be he worked with a library of existing compounds that showed some activity against cystic fibrosis in preliminary screenings.
I don't know, I heard some kids at the same fair got a pig and an elephant to make love.
That was the senior prom.
(I'm sorry, I'll shut up now)
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Did you guys not read the full article or see this on the news? This kid took 2 drugs that were being tested with consent of the drug company and put them together, and it seems to work. WOW how about that it takes a simple solution to solve a problem. Also this kid will be working with the drug company to see what in the 2 compounds is actually working to fix the cells. Sounds to me like he has found a job for the future.
And why did he do this? To win a $5000 scholarship for university, which he did win.
No, just drugs that they either didn't adequately test ... or that they selectively dropped the results indicating that they gave you a higher likelihood of killing you.
While Big Pharma does crank out drugs, they're not exactly showing a stellar track record of actually making sure they're safe. They mostly assume they're safe if it doesn't kill you in the first few weeks.
And, then of course there's the constant commercials for a drug you should "ask your doctor about" -- sometimes they don't say what it treats, but they give a litany of side effects which sound like you'd need to be desperate to try. So, when a patient goes into a doctor insisting they should get some astra-awesome-a or something, the doc just writes a scrip of gives out the free samples the sales rep dropped off.
You'll excuse us for not attributing any concern for our welfare to these companies. They're like the tobacco industry in a lot of ways ... it's in their interests to tell you their product is perfectly safe and didn't kill more than half of the 100 rats they tested on. At least, not right away.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Who appears to do this sorta thing professionally. The 16 year old should be given a BIG pat on the back for contacting a LONG list of scientists to find one that would work with him. Unfortunately, the news industry really likes to play up the whole "Kid Genius" story, since it make all of us feel old, and useless. :)
I doubt they'd have as many people passing around the article if it focused on a normal research group working as intended and including (as is typical) young mentees in the process so that they can learn about the research process.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Sorry, but this is *not* any innovative science. Rather, it is a computational reproduction of facts already well known. Nothing more than a typical molecular modeling class assignment during a graduate chemistry education.
He did not invent any new drugs - the really breakthrough was by the researchers of Vertex Pharmaceuticals, see for example VX-770.
He did not discover the mechanism of action of the drugs. Rather, he took published protein structures and published compounds and re-ran some docking studies (of the same type Vertex and other pharmaceutical companies probably spend hundreds of thousands of processor hours on, with the difficulty that they had to check tens of thousands of compounds, not just two already known to work).
He was not the first to notice that different promising compounds in clinical trials have different points of interaction with the defective proteins of CF. Thinking that a drug combination may be useful is not exactly a new and brilliant insight, and this was for example even discussed a couple of months ago in CE&N (the general chemistry member journal of the American Chemical Society). I am very confident that is has been evaluated before, and probably there are patents already filed.
The only interesting point here is that the guy is 16,not 20 or 22 like the normal chemistry student. But then pressing the right buttons in a molecular modeling software is really not that difficult, especially when you already know the outcome you want to reproduce.
Right, and suddenly as Lipitor's (atorvastatin) patent expires, every single patient is being switched to Crestor (rosuvastatin), a much newer and better (patented) drug.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
He will be disqualified from the science fair for using living cells, chemicals and drugs. He will then be expelled and arrested in accordance with the schools zero tolerance policy.
I don't know, I heard some kids at the same fair got a pig and an elephant to make love.
Ridiculous! Haven't you ever heard that song by Loverboy?
I'll be honest, we're throwing science against the wall to see what sticks. -Cave Johnson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escitalopram would be a perfect example. Citalopram's patent expired, so they found a new way to encapsulate the drug so that they could continue to sell the patented version. The new drug works exactly the same way that the old drug worked, has exactly the same mechanism, and a nearly identical success rate in clinical trials, but because it's encapsulated, it's technically a different drug, so they were able to renew the patent. I would lay odds that they have already developped the replacement for when Escitalopram's patent expires.
It's also a perfect example of a case where medical professionals are lobbied to continue selling the expensive proprietary drug... because the patent has expired, you can get a generic off-label version of Citalopram for a fraction of the cost of Escitalopram, but doctors continue to prescribe the newer version because the company that makes it lobbies physicians against prescribing the cheaper drug. (and all of the references you seek are cited in the Wikipedia article above)
Citation necessary. You don't suppose that for things like that newer medications might actually be better? It does happen from time to time.
The other bit is that just because the medication itself is no longer subject to patent protection, doesn't mean that the delivery system is. Which is one of the reasons why sometimes patients will react differently to a generic than to a name brand. If the medication isn't time released it's much less likely to be a problem, but even there you can run into issues.
I'm a pharmacist an I've seen no raise in patients taking crestor. Beyond that, when Lipitor goes generic, script insurance will no longer want to pay for crestor, or if they they do, the co-pay will be high as hell.
In that case we make calls and have it changed to a generic. I rarely have a doc say no.
How about this. Or even this.
A company that releases a product that destroys their own ability to profit will not be a company for very long. Pharmaceutical companies are, well, companies. As such, they will act as companies do.
And, then of course there's the constant commercials for a drug you should "ask your doctor about" -- sometimes they don't say what it treats
That would be the commercials intended for the Canadian or international markets.... in Canada, it's not legal to advertise for drugs, and the way around that is to avoid mentionning both the drug name and what it treats in the same advert. On the other hand, that legal loophole has led to some of the more amusing Viagra and Cialis commercials out there...
I won 2nd place at the State Science Fair because some other kid had a Commodore 64 computer with pixels flashing on the screen. He explained that this was the beginning of a program to track Soviet submarines off the US East Coast. Computers were still novel enough at that point, apparently, that they had no idea that all he had done was program some pixels to flash. But I'm not still bitter about it. ;)
Here you go. Crestor will decrease your relative risk by 44-53% of an adverse cardiovascular event, depending on the study. Impressive (it cuts your risk in half!), until you find out that your absolute risk was around 1% to begin with. For this you are shelling out $200/month, every month. Is it better? Yes. Undoubtedly Crestor is better than Lipitor. Now let's talk a moment about actual disease prevention... does it make much more difference versus lipitor? Not really. 0.5% a year compared to 1% a year, hmm, I guess it only makes a difference if you are the rare person actually having a heart attack which could have been prevented by "upgrading" the drug. The other 99 people, however, are paying through the nose.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
That is because those drug purchases are subsidized by the government via taxes collected.
Wrong - it is because the federal government, in combination of the provincial governments, do a collective bargin with the drug companies so that all of Canada gets one price for a drug. This works out very well because the federal government controls the laws on patents and damages and can threaten greedy companies with changing the law to allow canadian companies to made copies of their drugs. Of course this would come at a large political price but at least they have a large enough stick to threaten the pharmaceutical companies with in order to keep them somewhat reasonable.
Its very easy to see this happening all the time. Its been happening over the last 10 years or so with all those new-fangled anti-depressants. You can get the brand name one in capsule form or the Generic out of patent one in pill form.
I forget the two it was, but I had a shill doctor prescribe the first one and then a real doctor prescribe the cheaper, same effectiveness, generic.
You're an idiot. Let's break down how:
1) Life expectancy for people with CF is ~40-45 years today. WITH modern medical care.
2) The reportedly successful drug cocktail of two already-existing drugs:
a) Would extend the lives of those people with CF by years - meaning more sales over time;
b) Would require $0 new research to produce - these drugs already exist;
c) Would not "cure" the underlying genetic condition, meaning that if you have CF, you need this cocktail for as long as you're alive to manage your disease;
What world do you live in that increased sales to a new market, over a longer time frame, with zero up-front development costs equals "no profitability"?
...and in the real world, many patients are on lovastatin, pravastatin, or simvastatin instead of on-patent statins like Lipitor or Crestor precisely because the patents have run out and they are available as inexpensive generics. It is not in the doctors' best interests to have their patients get sticker shock every time they go to the pharmacy to pick up a newly-prescribed medication, since the patients will go to docs that don't try to bankrupt them at the prescription counter. Most patients know about the $4 lists and get very PO'd when you prescribe something that costs a hundred bucks a month. .
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
See subject-line, & at the very least, at least you have some added hope @ the very least. However, from the sounds of it ( & I read this days ago on "The Register" ), it does look promising!
I liked this quote from you especially:
"we just need some fresh thought at a new problem" - by devleopard (317515) on Friday May 13, @02:10PM (#36120516) Homepage
That's what was said of John Nash (nobel prize winner in economics for game theory in economics/Nash Equilibrium)
As a final "aside": I liked that the boy used computer science to aid him here. I think it probably gave him more credibility having his methods modeled & "tested" this way in fact.
APK
P.S.=> Good luck (to yourself AND this Canadian boy) in dealing with your illness - he might have done the job here hopefully, for yourself & again, others like you as well suffering from it... apk
is that 44-53% absolute or 44-53% vs the best currently used drug or best currently used drug out of patent?
It's important to note that this project was neither independent driven by the student nor was it through the student's high school - he was working as a student in a larger, well established lab. To provide some prospective, in biology it's very common for students (high school or undergraduate) to come in a work in a lab for short periods of time (particularly during the summer). We typically give them introductory projects and they're very heavily mentored (honestly, they typically slow down research more than they help - but we need to get them excited as the next generation of scientists and it's a great recruitment tool for graduate schools); the project described as the in the article is a perfect example. These articles are great because it highlights research and excites students about science. Unfortunately these summaries also hurt us as it makes it appear that discoveries like the one described (which is very premature) are easy and that 'regular scientists' are simply holding back (as evident by a few of the comments already posted here on Slashdot). Kudos to the Mr. Zhang but let's keep in mind that this isn't some student working out of his garage.
Should get honorable mention for that professional display alone.
What happened to white cardboard and black Sharpies.
From the article:
"Now Zhang and a trio of Montreal students who took second place for their technique for making sorbet without gelatin move on to compete against U.S. and Australian teams at the International BioGENEius Challenge in Washington, D.C., June 27."
Man, the second place team is looking pretty pathetic now...
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
The difference between citalopram and escitalopram is not in the delivery system, it's in the molecular orientation of the drug itself. Escitalopram is only the active S enantiomer whereas the generic citalopram contains the inactive (and as far as we can tell, biologically inert) D enantiomer as well as the active S enantiomer. Yes, citalopram and escitalopram are the same active drug, think of citalopram to have more "inert filler" in each pill than escitalopram. There are a few other drugs like this- levalbuterol (Xopenex- the S-enantiomer of albuterol), esomeprazole (Nexium- the S-enantiomer of omeprazole). Doctors are well aware of this and rarely prescribe the on-patent pure-enantiomer drugs. Probably the biggest reason I've seen is insurance company formularies having the on-patent drug available at a lower co-pay to the patient than the generic OR the doc having samples on hand and filling a patient's prescription with those samples. Either way, the patient isn't paying more to have the brand-name drug. Patients hate to pay one cent more for health care than they believe they have to, and will go to great lengths to avoid doing so. Patients will and do go elsewhere for medical services if they feel they are having to pay too much. Also, you can only patent a pure stereoisomer version of a drug once. Once escitalopram's patent runs out, the manufacturer would have to make another modification to the molecular structure (adding/subtracting substituent groups) to result in something patentable. Healthcare professionals are lobbied by drug reps to prescribe their drugs, sure. But when all you can get from the drug reps is an occasional inexpensive in-your-office bagged lunch (most freebies are now illegal), their effect is pretty darned low. Your patients complaining about you/the pharmacy/the medical profession in general trying to rip them off by prescribing expensive meds is FAR more common and carries much more weight than a boxed lunch from a sandwich shop once a month.
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
Versus the "standard of care", which in this case was Lipitor. Ethics committees don't let you use "control" groups anymore in medicine. Your "control group" has to consist of the best available alternative drug, if one exists. If you think about it, it makes sense. You can't really give coronary patients sugar pills and tell them they're still receiving treatment. However giving them the best available treatment means they have nothing to lose if the test drug turns out to be no better than what is currently available.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Maybe the science fair has been replaced by an intelligent design fair already?
Nah. Some kid who tested 6 different denture adhesives in Coke will win because the judges actually understand WTF he did. At least that's how it worked at science fairs when I was in school.
You probably should have learned how to explain your volcano better.
HEY! I'll have you know I had the FINEST potato battery at the fair!
There are two things wrong with your reasoning. One, companies don't care about preserving other companies' ability to profit. If Merck comes out with a product that renders several of Pfizer's drugs obsolete, Merck isn't going to give two shakes about Pfizer's bottom line and sure as shooting is going to release that product. Two, something that is so effective as to "destroy [the] ability to profit" in itself is a very salable product and you can make money from it and thus it WILL be sold. Vaccines are a great example of this. They eradicated one disease (smallpox) from the face of the earth and made other formerly-ubiquitous diseases very rare. Their cost is typically not that high and they certainly do result in "lost revenue" to the healthcare industry as a whole because of fewer drugs being prescribed and fewer doctors' visits and hospital stays. You would think that if the "destroying their own ability to profit" motive really was happening that doctors would discourage people from getting immunizations and that no companies would dare make and sell vaccines. Yet doctors are huge proponents of vaccines and there are quite a few vaccine manufacturers out there. Come on, use a little common sense and give up the "evil Big $INDUSTRY is sitting on this revolutionary invention to prevent its use" conspiracy nonsense- it makes as much sense as the "vaccines causing autism" and birther conspiracy crowds.
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
L vs D, S vs R. Xopenex is the levorotatory isomer of albuterol only; escitalopram is S-citalopram without the R-citalopram. Otherwise entirely correct. Personally, I'd never prescribe an enantiomerically pure drug unless the unwanted isomer had a really nasty set of effects.
The last cure was polio. Is that citation enough for you?
"The laws of science be a harsh mistress." --Bender
How are you holding up? Because I'm a potato.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
Nah. Some kid who tested 6 different denture adhesives in Coke will win because the judges actually understand WTF he did. At least that's how it worked at science fairs when I was in school.
F**king magnets, how do they work?
This *was* in fact part of a science fair of sorts.
I happened to see him presenting to the judges at the NRC here in Ottawa.
His presentation was one of several very impressive science projects.
It was the "Sanofi/Aventis Biotech Challenge", an annual event that calls up science projects from across the country and culminates in a trip to Ottawa and presentations to a panel of judges.
Go Canadian science-interested youth! woot!
My money is on this being fake.
16 year olds don't have access to super computers nor a clue about how to find one.
Nor do they know what drugs do which things, (street drugs excepted of course).
The relationship with the "mentor" company, Sanofi-Aventis apparently suggests there is
some angle being played here by the mentor company, and I'm willing to bet it has
something to do with patents.
The story doesn't pass the sniff test.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
That's depressingly plausible...
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Oh come now, their project was first rate. They scraped a cow hide to get a gelatin protein which they then placed in ice cream to get smaller than usual crystals. They have no idea how it works but the ice cream is smoother which will of course means greater consumption of frozen desert products. This in turn increases the incident of obesity and secondary health problems such as diabetes, coronary artery disease etc.. Naturally they will come out ahead of Zhang since Cystic Fibrosis is a backwater disease and makes little money relative to the treatment of the health problems plaguing fat people.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
It is 44-53% vs a placebo. The placebo is probably actually pretty good at reducing these events on its own.
We have barriers to entry for a reason! Think about the guys who actually spent 8 years in academia in order to get to work on this problem!
> "All of this is likely moot as the kid does not own the rights to the compounds. TFA doesn't specify whether they are novel but my guess would be he worked with a library of existing compounds that showed some activity against cystic fibrosis in preliminary screenings."
My understanding is that the kid used two preexisting drugs for cystic fibrosis and used them together. Essentially, the same thing people are doing with AIDS drugs cocktails.
A) You're understanding of statistic is horrid.
I mean, this sentence is painful to read:
"Not really. 0.5% a year compared to 1% a year, hmm, I guess it only makes a difference if you are the rare person actually having a heart attack which could have been prevented by "upgrading" the drug. The other 99 people, however, are paying through the nose."
B) Yes, you can use control group in medicine, stop lying.
C) You grossly misunderstand Executives.
Seriously, if Company A has a cure, that means company A's stock price goes up, and thus executives get more money.
By not releasing a cure, then that means either another company will, or then next executive will and make the huge bonus.
From both Business and greed sides of things you argument makes no damn sense.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
But if you insist on citation, here is one: Roche Blocking Blindness Cure.
You can still get the generic of Celexa.i.e. Citalopram'
For someone who spouts off, you could at least know that Citalopram is the generic.
Medical professionals? that' term is so wide, it's non sense. Did nurses? Drs? or was it lobbied by the sales side of a pharma company?
Look, the pharmaceutical hires the best scientists in the world. They also hire the best sales people int he world.
They don't make a lot of profit, and the produce and sell some thing near cost becasue of the public good.;
They are very complex, and complexity added with something people don't understand makes a company a target to scare tactics, and falsehoods.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Citation necessary.
What are you, Wikipedia?
Fine, but I didn't understand your post at all.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
well...
" b) Would require $0 new research to produce - these drugs already exist;"
they would need to research them together and do studies. so no 0 cost. Cheap, but mot zero.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You wouldn't have any interest in invading the U.S. and taking over, would you?
We'll greet you with flowers.
"16 year olds don't have access to super computers nor a clue about how to find one."
well that's false. Hint, look up SCINET
"Nor do they know what drugs do which things, "
wtf?
I get it. some kid may have done something you could have never done because you spent your teen years stoned. Therefore it's fake.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
He actually did take first place. However, there was a special prize for entry with best commercial applications. That went to the second-place project: vegan sorbet.
That's a naive notion. It's rare that I ever have had a doctor that seemed to ever care about the costs of treatments, and many don't like to talk about money. They tend to either be so far removed from the costs, that they have no clue, or sometimes they simply seem to find it crass or petty of a subject to discuss.
I've only had one doctor who seemed to really care about costs to his patients, and who would freely discuss (or even bring it up himself) the costs that could be potentially involved with treatments, tests, or procedures. Unfortunately, he finally retired out of frustration with the system in general.
This is a Canadian Sputnik.
In the US, our state and federal governments are attacking teachers' unions, attacking teachers, firing teachers based on (unvalidated and fake) student test scores http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Rhee#Testing_Scandal, and requiring science teachers to teach evolution.
Canadians are teaching their kids real science. In 20 years, they're going to be up there with the Chinese, Europeans and Australians at the cutting edge of scientific research, and our kids are going to be sneaking over the border to get jobs serving bacon cheeseburgers in the Canadian fast food restaurants and trying to sell mortgage-backed securities.
Maybe if the Canadians humiliate us enough, it will be a wakeup call.
Only leave Bell Sympatico and Rogers above the current border. Especially Rogers. They can go huff a car exhaust.
@Mindless Drivel: 100% of Twitter posts ever Tweeted.
I'd say yours was worth even less. Use Google.
>>Citation? Your statement is plausible, but unsupported, and therefore worthless.
= 9J =
"Better"? Not necessarily.
Study: Crestor Riskier Than Other Statins
"The new study, based on side effects reported to the FDA, said kidney problems and muscle weakness were two to eight times more frequent among Crestor users than those taking other cholesterol-lowering medications like Lipitor, Zocor and Pravachol."
http://health.dailynewscentral.com/content/view/833/0
= 9J =
If I had a 16-year old kid, he had better know how to mow grass, rocket-scientist be damned.
Further, expensive placebos have been shown to be more effective than cheaper placebos.
It's not a naive notion, I am a healthcare worker and see this day in and day out. Granted I work in primary care instead of in some specialty, but costs ARE a big factor and are discussed very openly and very frequently in the several places I have worked. Medical students and residents are taught to keep costs in mind and providers are reminded by patient feedback (usually angry feedback if they forget) to keep costs in line. The bottom line is that a patient who has to pay a non-trivial amount of money for a prescription, test, or procedure is not going to have it done and they are going to be royally PO'd at whoever prescribed/ordered/performed whatever it was that cost so much. Maybe specialists are a different story, but primary care physicians are nearly universally aware of the costs and conscious of them to varying degrees. I'd be willing to bet that your doc that discussed the costs freely and then retired was likely an internist or a family doc who dealt with a bunch of Medicare/Medicaid/not insured patients. Medicare/Medicaid doesn't pay for much and deductibles can be quite high, so a lot of the treatments have to be prescribed with the intention that the patient has to pay for a good chunk of it or all of it out of pocket. You get to be very aware of the costs in a hurry in that case as patients will simply not get the expensive stuff done and then complain to you about how expensive it would have been. Medicaid and Medicare also are royal pains in the butt to deal with, which is probably where a lot of the frustration came from. The words "prior authorization" were likely the bane of that poor doc's existence.
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
The sad thing about this is his possible treatment will be quietly buried and forgotten while the so called "Foundations" and "charities" hang around collecting more money all in the name of "finding cures"
I think the kid was Asian.
It also depends if the 2 drugs are owned (through patents/etc) by the same company. If not, I doubt either one will help the other, even for their own profit.
> 'Zhang then tested his theory in living cells, and the results exceeded his expectations.' That is real research, real testing and discovery that the combination works better than expected. No one else published that yet.
Oh, so you shift the burden of payment to countries that don't do this.
As an American you should really not need a Brit living in Canada to explain capitalism to you. Companies will charge the maximum price that they can for their products, NOT what it cost to develop it. Just because Canada cut a good deal with them does not mean that they will charge anyone else more. They will charge the US what they think you will pay.
I believe your president Roosevelt had the saying "speak softly but carry a big stick"...it is a tactic that has worked well for Canada and would undoubtedly work well for the US. The only casualties will be reduced profits for the shareholders of big pharma....although we would all need to be careful not to overdo it too much - they do need to make profits just not the obscenely large ones they do at the moment.
By the time the actual drug companies get their hands on it, the cure will be broken down into so many treatments you will more than likely go broke or die before you ever get cured.....lets face it hope = profit, keeping it from big business is the only hope, but whats the chances of that happening?