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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.
Their lives were forever changed. One developed incredible muscles, which he used to fight crime. The other's brain was equally enhanced, but her turned to a life of crime.
Given that Ebola is currently confined to Africa, and that a relatively small number of people have caught it (less than 4000)...and these outbreaks seem to only come along once every 20 years, where was the incentive for the drug company to create this drug? Was it good timing that it has something ready to go just now. Will each dose be prohibitively expensive to administer in Africa, or it remains to be seen if WHO will foot the bill to the tune of 10's of millions $$.
It's only "secret" in the sense that almost all pharmaceutical research is completely ignored by the media.
If you dig around you'll find some articles about ZMAPP in no-name low-impact journals like PNAS and Science.
"Secret"
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
As a researcher in the pharma industry: You are an idiot.
Where can I find the tens to hundreds of millions in public money needed to fund clinicals for a single drug that will most likely not get approved? That money doesn't exist, and many promising drugs die because companies run out of money. So companies have to have major profits on the few drugs that succeed- you should think about it as if you were playing the lottery, but each ticket cost you 10+ mil. High risk-high reward.
Also, a lot of cost is added by FDA incompetence. Yes, they are needed. Yes, we need to make sure everything is safe to some reasonable statistical level. Unfortunately, old rules and test requirements are never removed, so a company has to do a barrage of tests on everything, of which 90% are redundant outdated tests that nobody uses anymore.
I don't really understand the hatred for drug companies. Why is it a problem to pay a few hundred bucks for a pill that will literally save your life, but not a problem to pay thousands for your car? We need new drugs to replace failing medicines, and cure untreatable diseases. If we want to solve the problem of these diseases, we need to give a reason for people to form companies in this area, and that isn't going to happen without an expectation to get the money spent back.
I don't really understand the hatred for drug companies.
Well, since you (sort of) asked... Americans pay an outrageous amount for health care and the largest institutional beneficiaries of that are the drug companies, being the only group with double digit profits (the other beneficiaries are high salaried individuals). Defenders of big pharma's high profits usually try to wave away complaints by saying that it's necessary to fund drug research, never mind that if the money was going to research than it wouldn't qualify as profits, but the largest allotment of drug company money goes to advertising useless drugs to people who don't need them - research averages less than 20% of pharma budgets.
Then there's the lobbying: the Medicare Modernization Act forbade the government from negotiating on the cost of drugs, ensuring that Medicare pays twice as much as other groups for common drugs. This was essentially a $200 billion gift the the pharmaceutical industry passed under the pretense of "avoiding socialism." The United States is the only country in the world which both allows drugs to be patented and does nothing to limit the cost of those drugs. And speaking of patents, we have the drug companies to blame for the death of every attempt to pass patent reform - they need strong and indiscriminate patents for foreign markets since many countries, the poorer ones in particular, need drugs but can't afford the licensing. It's funny, but the reason why we have all the problems with software patents doesn't really have anything to do with software.
Oh, and also there's the whole thing about killing people for profit. Remember Vioxx?
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.