A cure found for cancer... that no one will ever get.

[Phoenix44]

Well, as far as dichloroacetate being a "cure for cancer," I don't know. It sounds kind of simplistic, considering that the causes and expressions of "cancer" are multifactorial.

As for drug R&D, it goes like this:

The ONLY purpose of a pharmaceutical corporation, or any corporation, is to make money for its shareholders. That's why drug companies will not make drugs from which they cannot profit, even if it is in the public interest. They aren't charities.

Government is supposed to look out for "we the people," and the way that works is for the government to give grants to academia or research institution based scientist to fund research in the public good. Unfortunately, the overall allocation of government research money has gone down in recent years, with most of the increases going to defense related research. So if you're looking for the government to fund research in our behalf, all I can say is: not with this administration.

 

[Ping898]

It's amazing how Pharmaceutical Companies, ..... in the end really only give a damn about ..... their stock holders.

As a person with JNJ and a bunch of other pharm companies in my portfolio...I am fine with that. I am not rich, those companies doing what they are supposed is what will let me one day retire....

I have a pretty good chance of getting cancer in my life if genetics mean anything, I want the cure as much as the next person....heck my aunt was just diagnosed with breast cancer, but that does not mean a company should have to take on the costs of something just for the good of human kind....be nice if they did, but I will not berate them for not doing so.
Let the NIH....that is what it should be there for....
Plus we don't know for sure this is a cure. It is just something tat has a really good chance of a cure. Every month I read articles about this drug or that drug that looks sooooooo promising to cure disease X and then in the late stage trials killed more people that in helped....so now you want the pharm companies to invest millions upon millions for a cure to cancer that might not even work? As a share holder, I would be pissed about that...

 

[Nomad]

I find this and similar posts so sad.

As someone working in R&D for one of the "Dreaded Evil Pharmaceutical Companies Who Are Only After Profit and Don't Give a Damn About Curing Diseases or Improving Patients' Lives" I find this attitude on the part of people who in general have very little idea of what is involved very disheartening.

I am a chemist who designs drugs. As such, I spent 4 years in university as an undergraduate, followed by an additional 5 years in graduate school to get my Ph.D. in organic chemistry. Then I worked for $25/year doing postdoctoral work in a lab before getting my first "real" job as a scale-up chemist for a small company for 3 years.

Wanting to get into drug R&D, I joined another small company for 3 more years, which had some promising compounds and was bought out by a larger pharmaceutical company. They took the pipeline and promptly closed the company, and I fortunately found my current job, doing research on interesting targets for treatment of diabetes. It only took me 16 years to get here.

Anyone who claims that complex diseases like cancer have "cures" that are being ignored have absolutely no idea of the complexity of the diseases involved, or in the resources required to bring any compound to the marketplace.

Mouse models for cancer mean very little. As a whole, biologists have cured millions of mice of cancer, and very few people. It just doesn't normally translate very well... partly because the cancer in a mouse is normally the result of xenographic transplant of a specific human cancer cell line into the mouse. In reality, very few cancers in people are anywhere near that specific, and most compounds that are "general" enough to affect multiple cancer cell lines carry a fairly high toxic load as well (see Taxol for instance).

When biologists are sent into strange locals to find new drugs, they do then look for the active ingredients to make into a drug. This is NOT because natural products aren't profitable... have a look at the nutraceuticals industry to dispell that myth. The actual reasons for this are several: the natural material is very likely to have side effects caused by other materials present beside the pharmaceutically active ingredient; the material may be produced in very small amounts (they killed thousands and thousands of yew trees for the first couple of grams of taxol before synthetic routes were designed to get the same compound with less impact; when you go to compounds coming from specific insects, frogs, marine sponges, etc. the amount available tends to drop even further and makes it impossible to get something into the clinic for trials, nevermind being marketted as a drug); often the natural product has poor absorption or clearance rates and needs to be chemically manipulated to make something more attractive for dosing, or to get better selectivity on the target(s) of interest.

Now on to the greed section. Yes, pharmaceutical companies make money; those that don't are soon swallowed, bought out by others, or dry up and disappear. This is a fact of life of living in a free market economy, and no one is surprised when this is applied to other industries (see auto industry for example). The cost of bringing a promising pharmaceutical compound to market is astronomical... approximately 900 million dollars according to studies from the late 1990's (http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/38/15/25)

The time available for a company to make a profit on the compound is short; the clock starts ticking when the patents are filed, which is usually many years before anything can be brought to market. If you have a 20 year exclusivity window by modern patent laws, it may take 12 years to get something to market, leaving only 8 years before other companies can start making and selling generic versions of your drug. You have done the investment of research, time, and huge amounts of money for the clinical trials to prove that it is safe and effective; the generics companies reap the rewards as soon as it is "off-patent", and focus their research solely on less expensive manufacturing methods.

In general, the only money that feeds the R&D pipeline of a company comes from these blockbuster drugs during the short period while they are covered by the patent laws.

In all of the years of pharmaceuticals, we have "cured" only a handful of diseases that I'm aware of (eg. Polio, syphillis, we thought we had tuberculosis, but it's coming back in drug resistant forms now). Why? The simple reason is that most disease are multifactorial and have multiple forms. Cancers, bacteria and viruses all mutate; what is curing these diseases now won't do so indefinitely. There are a lot of different strategies tackling these problems (eg. hitting multiple unrelated targets, etc) but the efficacy of these methods is not fully known at the moment. Diabetes and metabolic diseases are even more complex; there's a massive system of biofeedback and multiple biological pathways involved that we're only starting to get a handle on.

For some reason, pharmaceutical companies in this country are more vilified than gun manufacturers, in spite of the fact that they (we) have done massive things to improve the length and quality of life and have been able to intervene and help with many devastating diseases affecting people. Don't believe me? Compare the survival rates for a breast cancer diagnosis 30 years ago to today.

It's very sad.

 

[buldog]

I recently had an uncle who was diagnosed with cancer. During the FIRST treatment of chemo he went into cardiac arrest and was dead in less than an hour. It was throat cancer and they put him on a chemo drip that he reacted to within seconds. In his case the treatment was far worse than the disease.

On another note, it seems that our healthcare system is set up to treat the symptoms not the cause of the disease. You are given drugs to relieve the symptoms of your problem, however these drugs have side effects that cause other symptoms. Next you go back and get more drugs to get rid of the new symptoms and they cause even more and the viscious cycle perpetuates itself. Half the time the drug you are given isn't even designed for that purpose, but the drug companies had their salesmen tell Dr.s that it was good for "this" too.

It's real hard to know who to trust your health to when your health seems to be the last thing on their mind.

 

[Touch Of Death]

Awesome news until we find out that Pharmacutial companies are refusing to fund research into it because they cannot Profit from the drug...



http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/130413/dichloroacetate_dca_a_cure_for_cancer.html

Personally... Call me a conspiracy nut, but I believe we have found or could very easily find, cures for everything from Aids, to Cancer, to even things like MS... if it wasnt so damn PROFITABLE to treat them.

That's what for profit means. Its a good argument for socialized medicine, but it would just be plain wrong to "help" in that direction.
Sean

 

[Archangel M]

Well Nomad, you may very well be right but on the internet its all about conspiracy, evil government agents and the apocolypse, so dont be surprised if youre ignored.