today.reuters.com — The billions of dollars thrown at global health problems by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are changing the game in drug discovery, posing big challenges to the world's top drugmakers, according to a report on Tuesday.
Apr 18, 2007 View in Crawl 4
brewbeauApr 18, 2007
They also include the expense accounts of the salespeople that shower doctors with samples, gifts, tickets to events, so they can get their FDA approval through faster. That's what's so shady. They money they throw around is obscene.
allahuakbarApr 18, 2007
fat789-Show your sources please. Most pharmaceutical detractors seem to make their claims on ignorance, yourself included.
scotticusApr 18, 2007
Wow... the amount of ignorance here is amazing. Drug development is HARD. Making molecules that are safe enough for you to eat is VERY HARD. Making drugs that are safe enough to eat AND are effective at treating a disease in most people is EXTREMELY HARD. Most people who work in this field doing R&D will never work on a project that leads to a drug. How messed up is that? To top it off, most regulations have changed (for the better) meaning that drugs need to be safer than ever before. Acetaminophen (tylenol), one of the most common drugs on the market, wouldn't get through the FDA do to its liver toxicity. New and better drugs are needed... if you want better drugs, you need to pay for them. To top it off, there are many diseases for which there are no good treatments... Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, many forms of cancer, HIV, etc. By paying for the drugs of today, you are funding the next generation of drugs... if that stops, no new drugs for you.Admittedly, there are several medicines for non-vital diseases... many of those, however, were discovered in the form of unintentional side effects. By the time you've invested hundreds of millions of dollars to find out a compound is safe to eat, finding a way to make money off of it is a blessing.@cjhowere: NSAIDs -- if you have debilitating arthritis, you should exercise more? really? me thinks that would be quite painful. "needing" drugs -- if you break your arm, do you NEED a cast? Do you NEED an mp3 player? Do you NEED a computer? Granted, we do live in a consumer culture... it has it's ups and downs, but I think I prefer that to the alternative.There are drugs in your list that extend your life. Proven. Do you NEED to live longer?I've taken two of the drugs that were in your list, and both of them drastically improved my way of life. I was on them for a couple weeks / a couple of months, developed no dependency, healed up and went on with my life. One of them (nexium) allowed my stomach to heal... I had been living with extremely painful reflux for months eating fruit, greens, and water... nothing helped. Other, older medications didn't work at all. After two weeks on Nexium, my stomach was fine and I was eating normally.
duniyadndApr 19, 2007
Because there's so much more in the world than HIV/AIDs. Such as how his foundation is responsible for 90% of the world's polio vaccines. And his foundation deals with education as well.
scotticusApr 19, 2007
Does disease prevention count? Chicken Pox? Small Pox? Malaria? HPV?What about diseases which are manageable? HIV? Parkinson's? Cancer? Diabetes?Man wins. Still no cure for stupid, however.
ajajadudeApr 19, 2007
I think it's just the irony of the whole situation: part of a drug company's business is to put, in a sense, part of itself out of business. You know it's crossed the minds of some of the big wigs (even if for just a fraction of a second) to try and hold something back because that something might eventually make it unnecessary for people to buy it in the future.You think about the number of people who don't get treatment for something like AIDS because the cost of the drugs is too prohibitive (such as in entire continents like Africa). Do you think the majority of those people have any trouble sleeping at night knowing they developed something to extend life but many people can't benefit from it? Hell, I bet it's written into their contract that they can't say jack to anyone about anything unless given permission.
scotticusApr 19, 2007
Cancer will never be cured. Ever. We're not even close, and it's a disease that spontaneous generates for more than a handful of reasons. Drug companies are going to have problems that need solving much longer than you or I will populate this planet. Merck (and soon GlaxoSmithKline) just released a vaccine which could eradicate most forms of cervical cancer, which is caused by HPV. Because it will take years/decades to eradicate a virus, they will be able to sell their products for the lifetime of the patent. By the time the disease is eradicated, the patent will have long expired and competition from generics would drive the price of the drug way down. "You think about the number of people who don't get treatment for something like AIDS because the cost of the drugs is too prohibitive (such as in entire continents like Africa). Do you think the majority of those people have any trouble sleeping at night knowing they developed something to extend life but many people can't benefit from it? Hell, I bet it's written into their contract that they can't say jack to anyone about anything unless given permission."People aren't developing drugs which are purposefully expensive... If a company could develop an effective and cheap drug they would... because there is little price control in the states, they could sell the drug cheap in the developing world and mark it way the hell up in the states and let (relatively) wealthy Americans foot the bill for the R&D. Unfortunately, HIV treatments are becoming more expensive and the virus becomes more difficult to kill. It's not good enough for a drug to kill one mutant of the virus these days... it has to be effective against a whole panel of 10 or more mutants to be worth taking. HIV is a real problem because the doses of the drugs are usually pretty high (not to mention that you have to take a whole c**ktail of drugs), and the drugs themselves are difficult/expensive to make. If you're a researcher, you can either develop the drug to the best of your ability, hoping that at least some people could benefit, or you could just not develop it at all and give up on HIV treatments. There are no cheap cures, because if there were, they would have been made available. You're right that employees have to sign something to prevent them from disclosing information -- it's to prevent giving proprietary information to competitors... not to hush you up over the miracle cures they have hiding in the basement.
scotticusApr 19, 2007
Marketing is certainly involved, but the major cost is actually all of the drugs that gets through all of those steps that jeimus layed out, then fail for some reason. The failure rate in drug development is staggeringly high, and comes at a great cost. The $800 million number that people cite is still climbing exponentially (some say it's closer to a billion now), and includes the cost of failed drug candidates.
mukundApr 19, 2007
it lloks like whatever bill gates does is hated by digg. :)Any ways What I think is what he has done is good.