Good news for cancer patients?

[the Jazz]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/27/healt ... nd&emc=rss

One has to wonder if it's an accident that this new drug costs $25,000 yearly for the rest of your life.

[roymond]

A good friend of mine is a molecular engineer, leading a group working on some of the proteins used to do gene splicing in this kind of research. It's insane work, but they make it look managable. Hell, my uncle died of myelogenous leukemia. Came home one month from an overseas job, died two months later. If they understand the process these cancers go through, then I imagine they'll be able to engineer triggers that warn of their presence before the cancer takes hold. Wild shit.

[bz£]

One has to wonder if it's an accident that this new drug costs $25,000 yearly for the rest of your life.

I'm surprised it's that cheap, given that the R&D that went into producing that drug is probably in the billion-dollar range. If this is really a fruitful line of research to pursue, I'd expect that we'll see much cheaper and more effective variations soon.

It's also highly unlikely that anyone is actually paying that much money for the drug. It's just clinical trial right now, which means the people taking it probably aren't paying anything; they may even be getting paid to serve as human guinea pigs.

[anti-m]

Hey! I work at OHSU! Thanks for the link!

[Adam!]

"Colon cancer was even more appealing..."

Could it get any more appealing?

[jack]

it costs on average, more than 800 million dollars to get a new drug approved by the FDA in this country, and you can't really make any real money from drug development until that happens. and that's if you get it approved, and that is a very big if. that's why alot of biotech companies end up licensing or partnering their compounds to big pharmas that can potentially commercialize these drug candidates if they ever get that far. but a company can spend 400-500 million dollars into a drug and see it sink in clinical trials and that money is pretty much gone. it's a crapshoot. and until the drug gets passed by the FDA and economies of scale kick in, the company has to try to recover some of that money that investors have put in.

that's why these drugs are so expensive in a nutshell. it's still a business.

[mico saudad]

Yeah it's a business. My only issue is that they spend 10% of their budget on advertising that should be illegal. If they spent that other 10% on R&D...

[jack]

i do marketing in the biotech industry and i'll be the first to admit that hideous, copious amounts of money are poured into advertising in this industry. they (not me) want you to go to your doctor and ask for that god forsaken purple pill by name. they know the real market is the consumer, the paranoid, immediate-gratification-and-solution-in-the-form-of-a-pill consumer, who will go to that doctor (who gets all kinds of gratis from sales reps) and get that pill, along with all those nasty side effects they like to talk about from the side of their mouth.

you can only do so much to test safety and efficacy. it's always gonna be a crapshoot, but if you're dying of cancer, a crapshoot might look pretty good no matter what it costs.

[the Jazz]

I understand that drugs are incredibly expensive to produce, it's the "for the rest of your life" thing that brings out the cynical asshole in me. The part of me that starts wondering if the pharmaceutical industry could actually be dirty enough that research is directed away from a cure and focused instead on merely keeping cancer patients alive so they never stop paying. Yes, I know, that's a pretty crazy tin-foil hat kind conspiracy theory kind of idea, but the potential profit that could come out of all the cancer patients in this country alone over the next Xty years is a hell of a lot more than 800 million. I just wonder.

[fodroy]

there was a news story like that a couple years ago. some asshole pharmacist was diluting some ladies cancer medication and somehow profitting from it. i forget the specifics, but whatever.

there are assholes in the world. a good number of them too. some bigger than others.

[mico saudad]

Yes, I know, that's a pretty crazy tin-foil hat kind conspiracy theory

No I don't think it's a conspiracy theory at all - I think jack is right, it's smart business. While the people that work for them may be fine people, we shouldn't think of drug companies as in any way altruistic.

- For the most part they only research treatments for 1st world diseases. Even though malaria kills 3,000,000 a year they don't really work on it because most of those killed can't afford to pay for the drugs. It's up to individuals funded by grants from the Gates Foundation, etc. to come up with a cure.

- Even among the 1st world diseases if there aren't enough people suffering from it to make it worth developing a drug it makes no business sense to invest in finding a treatment. Some cancers receive attention while others don't. There are plenty of rare genetic diseases that could probably have cures but who is going to do the drug development?

- And then if you focus on the diseases for which they do develop drugs it's no secret that they prefer treatments to cures. And we should not expect them to have any other interest in heart besides making money from people who need or want their product. If you want someone to find a way to cure a disease you better look to academia, private institutes, or other such foundation.

Diseases 'cured':
Bacterial Infections - Antibiotics discovered by Fleming, first produced by a a pair of British scientists.

Polio - Vaccine by an academic, Jonas Salk

Small pox - Research to develop cure performed by English physician (Jenner)

Guinnea worm - currently slated for eradication by WHO, little to no involvement with drug companies.

In other words if you want the basic science that's going to lead to cures, make sure the Bush administration stops wasting your tax dollars on ridiculous national security projects and sets our research funding back to where it was before he screwed things up. Approximately 16 out of 100 submitted grants are typically funded per section, per cycle. They are funding only 7 or 8 right now. Half of the science that needs to be done is getting funded.
And they're hassling foreign biologists who work in American labs because *obviously* they're terrorists, so time sensitive research projects get set back years because the US won't let them return home from a vacation abroad and it screws up the experiment. Then the foreign students don't want to come to America and it slows down scientific progress in general.

[mc3p0]

Does anyone here know about the Dr. Max Gerson therapy? Basically, it's eating 80% alkaline, 20% acidic foods and a 2 cup coffee enema nightly. This is basically the average American diet inverted.. literally.

[Plushpolly]

The following is a partial list of the more than 650 diseases that colloidal silver has been reputed to be successful against: acne, AIDS (Reference 8), allergies, appendicitis, arthritis, athlete's foot, bladder inflammation, blood parasites, blood poisoning, boils, burns, CANCER (References 2, 4, 7), candida, cholera, colitis, conjunctivitis, cystitis, dermatitis, diabetes (Reference 1), dysentery, eczema, fibrositis, gastritis, gonorrhea, hay fever, herpes, impetigo, indigestion, keratitis, leprosy, leukemia, lupus, lymphangitis, Lyme disease, malaria, meningitis, neurasthenia, parasitic infections: viral, fungal and bacterial pneumonia, pleurisy, prostate, pruritus ani, psoriasis, purulent opthalmia, rhinitis, rheumatism, ringworm, scarlet fever, septic conditions of the eyes, ears, mouth, and throat, seborrhea, septicemia, shingles, skin cancer, staphylococcus and streptococcus infections, stomach flu, syphilis, thyroid, tuberculosis, tonsillitis, toxemia, trachoma, all forms of virus, warts, whooping cough, yeast infection, stomach ulcer, canine parovirus and other veterinary uses, and fungal and viral attacks on plants. Simply spray diluted silver on the leaves and add to the soil.

Do the research it's incredible. . . i've heard that colloidal silver costs 800 times less than water to make

[Eric Y.]

how much does it cost to make water?

[a bebop a rebop]

reference 8) woohoo

[Plushpolly]

tvi: *buy bottled water


a bebop: the smiley face went through when I copied the paragraph but this is the website


http://www.all-natural.com/silver-1.html

[a bebop a rebop]

I understood. But why would you compare it to the price of bottled water?

[Steve Durand]

The following is a partial list of the more than 650 diseases that colloidal silver has been reputed to be successful against: ...

Sounds like snake oil to me. Be careful.

http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRel ... verad.html

Steve

[Poor June]

The following is a partial list of the more than 650 diseases that colloidal silver has been reputed to be successful against: ...

Sounds like snake oil to me. Be careful.

http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRel ... verad.html

Steve

nosedrops have silver nitrates, a bit different
the only found risk of colloidal silver is indeed agyria, but that only happens in very severe cases, where as a person takes far too much and even then, it's not life threatening whatsoever, that is only a skin disorder
an overdose on anything else, and you'd be dead
so i guess that's not all that bad, huh?

a nice place to read more about it would be, silvermedicine.org

(yea it's nice to be able to blow everything off as false) that doesn't necessarily make it so

however i suppose it all depends on, the chances willing to be taken
i haven't read anything that has talked about it any worse the agyria
and i've read quite a bit more about good things that have happened
the governer that got agyria still uses it everyday, and is still healthy

so i suppose it is all in how you look at it?

[Denyer]

damn bots man filling the forums with drug ads again.

[Plushpolly]

that drug may save your life one day, it'd be worth getting over yourself for . . . .

[Denyer]

I will die before I let a drug save my life.