>Why would any of the pharma companies out there want to invent a permanent cure, when there's far more money to be made with a cure that is not permanent? Makes no sense
Then why are there permanent cures credited to pharmaceutical companies such as
My point was why would you expect a group promoting a long-discredited COVID-19 prophylaxis to have a reasonable long COVID treatment? There are many clinical trials in progress testing treatments supported by better-grounded hypotheses. https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?recrs=&cond=long+covi...
> if there is already a drug that cures 75% of cancers and a new drug cures 85%, a clinical trial to detect that 10% difference will require a lot more people (and cost a lot more money).
That makes sense. Thank you.
> Additionally cost-efficiency is not a valid reason to allow a new drug (according to the FDA), you've got to be better than the last one.
Really? I did not know that. On the face of it, that seems absurd. If Treatment A cures at a 75% rate and costs $1M and Treatment B cures at a 72% rate (worse) and costs $10, it seems as if it would still be valuable to the market, no? Or am I mis-reading you?
> Companies are hardly going to make tons of money on unapproved therapies anyway, because the word will get out if x patients tried it and had no benefits.
That seems wildly optimistic to me. Companies, especially pharma, will always find ways to 'make tons of money'. The second part of the sentence assumes a level of disclosure (from the companies) and rationality (on the part of average people), that I don't believe exists in the world. There are plenty of examples to back that up, especially people's willingness to believe self-serving 'facts'.
> I have no knowledge of the field, but I'm guessing that zero profit potential for this therapy might have something to do with it.
It could be a trial financed by public institutions/governments, since it may have good impact on the overall health system if you can drastically reduce/delay cancer rates... (plus aspirin is dirty cheap to make compared to expensive cancer care once a cancer is found). Unless such institutions have a clear incentive to let people die earlier...
Anyway, my point is, even if for-profit organizations won't do it, public organizations should be able to get funding if it makes sense for the public good.
- it's not like you would cure everyone at once anyway
- there are always people who will develop the disease eventually so you can always make money in the long run
- if you are the only effective treatment you can pretty much make the price you want, and collect massive profits that can be invested in the develop of other drugs or solutions.
Never heard of vaccine companies going bankrupt, for example.
> You are very optimistic. Medics will sell expensive snake oil treatment
I think you misunderstood. My point was that it would benefit the families because a company would gladly pay a million bucks to give a dying cancer patient the first human dose of 40 drugs they haven’t yet done any testing on, just to get quick human feedback.
The “patient” in that scenario won’t likely get any benefit from the money, but the family they leave behind would.
Obviously this is not something we want to actually see happening, but the cynic in me know that if a company can save billions by skipping all trials and going straight to “dying human” they will, and they’d be happy to pay the expendable subject a million or even more, they still come out net positive.
> Antimalarial drugs touted by the White House as possible COVID-19 treatments looked to be not just ineffective, but downright deadly.
Immediately when the long knives came out against HCQ I was cynical. A drug on the market for 60 years (and over the counter in many countries) is “extremely dangerous”?
Or, more likely because it’s out of patent there’s a lot of money interested in exploring other things as a treatment.
> The title says it: if you’re involved in drug or medical development and have experienced the FDA’s torpor, or vengeance, consider getting in touch; anonymously is fine. I want to make explicit something a few people caught in “I am dying of squamous cell carcinoma, and the treatments that might save me are just out of reach:” many of the people with first-hand knowledge of the costs of the FDA’s slowness don’t want to speak out about it, even anonymously.
tl;dr: “ There was no evidence whatsoever of any benefit with any of these treatment regimes. There was significant evidence of harm. ... Tell me again why anyone should be advocating such treatments. But your reasons had better stand up to 14,888 patients versus 81,144 comparators. Make it good.“
> I don’t understand this push to discredit any therapeutic before reasonable research has even been conducted.
No such thing exists. There are literally dozens of therapeutics in trials , and a few actually approved and in non-trial general use (dexamethasone, remdesevir, and favilavir, in various jurisdictions) — for both, see [0] — the ones that tend to get strongly negative treatment are hydroxychloroquine (not actually in trials) and ivermectin (in Phase 2/3 trials), both on the basis of unsupported scams around both earlier in the pandemic, not any general aversion to therapeutics.
Not so:
https://www.cancernetwork.com/news/clinical-trial-explores-a...
Edit: Besides, what if the cure already exists, and Big Pharma wants to make more money selling long-term treatment drugs and equipment?
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