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"Secret Serum" Used To Treat Americans With Ebola
mrspoonsi (2955715) writes with news that the two Americans infected with Ebola in Liberia and transported to Atlanta for treatment were given an experimental drug, and their conditions appear to be improving. From the article: While some people do fight off the disease on their own, in the case of the two Americans, an experimental serum may have saved their lives. As Dr. Kent Brantly and missionary Nancy Writebol waited in a Liberian hospital, someone from the National Institutes of Health reached out to Samaritan's Purse, one of the two North Carolina-based Christian relief groups the two were working with, and offered to have vials of an experimental drug called ZMapp sent to Liberia, according to CNN's unnamed source. Although the Food and Drug Administration does allow experimental drugs to occasionally be distributed in life-threatening circumstances without approval under the expanded access or "compassionate use" conditions. It's not yet clear whether that approval was granted in this case or not. ... Brantly, who had been sick for nine days already ... [received] the first dose ... within an hour, he was able to breathe better and a rash on his body started to fade. The next day he was able to shower without help before boarding the air ambulance that flew him to Atlanta.
The drug is NOT ready. That's the whole point of this. They were given experimental "serum" which had not even reached Human trials (years away from them in fact, they had just recently reached simian trials after the mouse models which is essentially the very first step towards human trials). This stuff could have outright killed them. These two people subjected themselves to essentially untested experimentation in the hope of a miracle. They got lucky.
Had they tested this stuff on a bunch of Africans and they died can you imagine the bad press it would have generated? I can see the headlines now. "America tests drugs on poor Africans in unethical medical experimentation".
As another researcher in the pharma industry: reread your post. Your entire post is only highlighting how poor of a job pharmaceutical companies do at effectively bringing drugs to market, all while adding the inefficiency of a 20% profit margin. The emphasis on profit alone also leads to too great of a focus on evergreening and low risk projects.
I've worked in a university lab that brought two (while I was there) drugs from design, synthesis, and screening through animal testing for the cost of an R01 ($250k) each. I realize that the clinicals are more expensive, but even $10M/drug is pretty small change compared to posted phama expenses. It's the bloat above the $10M per drug that makes them so expensive.
Hatred for drug companies comes from the (at least perceived) extortionate nature of the business. People feel as if their health is held ransom for another person's profit. Hospitals share the same ill feelings. It's especially potent because the people who profit the most from the whole scheme are already obscenely wealthy. Buying a car doesn't have the same "life or death" aspect to it.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
It's also shit like taking colchicine, which has been cheap and generic for years, doing a little extra research (which arguably was useful) and then using that status to bump the price up by 15 times.
Those people taking the drug couldn't give a shit about the research - they take the pills, their gout gets better, that's their own personal research right there. What sticks in their craw is that their pills now cost $5 apiece.
That and the systematic hiding of research that is negative or equivocal, the deliberate creation of medicines that are just a couple of atoms different from an existing one, not because they'll be better but because they'll be on patent, etc, etc.
Big pharma does a lot of good, but it's kind of like picking gold coins out of a midden.
Actually what you see here is very well understood. You are seeing an inelastic market; that is if a drug or procedure will save you life, it does not matter of it costs $5 or $5000, you will find the money to pay for it. The reason why socialized healthcare drives costs down is because the government / the insurance company will bargain on your behalf. Since they are not the one who is going to die, they can not be extorted and can pit different drug makers against each other. Health care is one of the few areas where "the free market" does not work as naively expected.