You think we would have anywhere near the range of modern medical wonders that we do by depending on the kindness of strangers?
Yes, I think we would have just as robust, if not a much more robust, range of 'medical wonders' if we recognized that many of the best minds are more interested in fundamental research (Pasteur) or defeating an adversary (Salk) than just making money. Do you even have a counterpoint or counterexample that compares to the genesis of germ theory or the development of the Polio vaccine that was accomplished via the much-vaunted Profit Motive (TM) ?
Um, everything newer? You are pointing to discoveries from an earlier time where it was easier to make earth shattering discoveries because so much less had been discovered. There are still absolute wonders being created by pharma and tech companies all the time. Lipitor, Viagra, Prozac etc. are all wonder drugs that improved countless people's lives, and they were all developed by big pharma.
You think we would have anywhere near the range of modern medical wonders that we do by depending on the kindness of strangers?
Yes, I think we would have just as robust, if not a much more robust, range of 'medical wonders' if we recognized that many of the best minds are more interested in fundamental research (Pasteur) or defeating an adversary (Salk) than just making money. Do you even have a counterpoint or counterexample that compares to the genesis of germ theory or the development of the Polio vaccine that was accomplished via the much-vaunted Profit Motive (TM) ?
Um, everything newer? You are pointing to discoveries from an earlier time where it was easier to make earth shattering discoveries because so much less had been discovered. There are still absolute wonders being created by pharma and tech companies all the time. Lipitor, Viagra, Prozac etc. are all wonder drugs that improved countless people's lives, and they were all developed by big pharma.
True story, the anticancer drug Paclitaxel was discovered by a botanists and synthesized by a chemist as part of a National Cancer Institute program.
I would have picked better examples.
Lipitor is part of the statin family. A chemical found naturally in red yeast rice, oyster mushrooms, and a type of bacteria.
Prozac is derived from the antihistamine diphenhydramine, a drug discovered by a chemist at the University of Cincinnati.
I'll concede you Viagra, although the fact that drugs for erectile dysfunction and male pattern baldness are the most sold medications on the planet is probably saying...something.
You think we would have anywhere near the range of modern medical wonders that we do by depending on the kindness of strangers?
Yes, I think we would have just as robust, if not a much more robust, range of 'medical wonders' if we recognized that many of the best minds are more interested in fundamental research (Pasteur) or defeating an adversary (Salk) than just making money. Do you even have a counterpoint or counterexample that compares to the genesis of germ theory or the development of the Polio vaccine that was accomplished via the much-vaunted Profit Motive (TM) ?
Um, everything newer? You are pointing to discoveries from an earlier time where it was easier to make earth shattering discoveries because so much less had been discovered. There are still absolute wonders being created by pharma and tech companies all the time. Lipitor, Viagra, Prozac etc. are all wonder drugs that improved countless people's lives, and they were all developed by big pharma.
True story, the anticancer drug Paclitaxel was discovered by a botanists and synthesized by a chemist as part of a National Cancer Institute program.
I would have picked better examples.
Lipitor is part of the statin family. A chemical found naturally in red yeast rice, oyster mushrooms, and a type of bacteria.
Prozac is derived from the antihistamine diphenhydramine, a drug discovered by a chemist at the University of Cincinnati.
I'll concede you Viagra, although the fact that drugs for erectile dysfunction and male pattern baldness are the most sold medications on the planet is probably saying...something.
The vast majority of pharmaceuticals are invented either in universities, government labs or private research institutions like Cold Harbor Springs. The money for that research comes almost exclusively from government agencies like the NIH or various European agencies.* Corporate funding and private donations are a drop in the bucket.
Where pharmaceutical companies fit is that they take those discoveries and formulate drugs - i.e. finding the right balances of chemical to body composition, sourcing suppliers for those chemicals and running manufacturing and distribution networks.
While pharmaceuticals have labs that pay a lot more than the alternatives, working in a pharma lab is considered a huge step down in a researcher's career. That's why the pay tends to be higher - the work is dull, the science is routine and unexciting and the chances for a major, career-making breakthrough are slim. In the world of research science, the best and brightest absolutely do not follow the money. Most would rather have the shot at a Nobel.
* The NIH pays for a lot of research in Europe and a lot of European grants fund American researchers. Asian nations aren't really a player in this, yet.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
You think we would have anywhere near the range of modern medical wonders that we do by depending on the kindness of strangers?
Yes, I think we would have just as robust, if not a much more robust, range of 'medical wonders' if we recognized that many of the best minds are more interested in fundamental research (Pasteur) or defeating an adversary (Salk) than just making money. Do you even have a counterpoint or counterexample that compares to the genesis of germ theory or the development of the Polio vaccine that was accomplished via the much-vaunted Profit Motive (TM) ?
Um, everything newer? You are pointing to discoveries from an earlier time where it was easier to make earth shattering discoveries because so much less had been discovered. There are still absolute wonders being created by pharma and tech companies all the time. Lipitor, Viagra, Prozac etc. are all wonder drugs that improved countless people's lives, and they were all developed by big pharma.
True story, the anticancer drug Paclitaxel was discovered by a botanists and synthesized by a chemist as part of a National Cancer Institute program.
I would have picked better examples.
Lipitor is part of the statin family. A chemical found naturally in red yeast rice, oyster mushrooms, and a type of bacteria.
Prozac is derived from the antihistamine diphenhydramine, a drug discovered by a chemist at the University of Cincinnati.
I'll concede you Viagra, although the fact that drugs for erectile dysfunction and male pattern baldness are the most sold medications on the planet is probably saying...something.
The vast majority of pharmaceuticals are invented either in universities, government labs or private research institutions like Cold Harbor Springs. The money for that research comes almost exclusively from government agencies like the NIH or various European agencies.* Corporate funding and private donations are a drop in the bucket.
Where pharmaceutical companies fit is that they take those discoveries and formulate drugs - i.e. finding the right balances of chemical to body composition, sourcing suppliers for those chemicals and running manufacturing and distribution networks.
While pharmaceuticals have labs that pay a lot more than the alternatives, working in a pharma lab is considered a huge step down in a researcher's career. That's why the pay tends to be higher - the work is dull, the science is routine and unexciting and the chances for a major, career-making breakthrough are slim. In the world of research science, the best and brightest absolutely do not follow the money. Most would rather have the shot at a Nobel.
* The NIH pays for a lot of research in Europe and a lot of European grants fund American researchers. Asian nations aren't really a player in this, yet.
Without that boring work, isn't the sexy, bold work the guys at the universities are doing basically useless? To hear about amazing discoveries in university labs all the time. They don't always wind up helping anybody.
You think we would have anywhere near the range of modern medical wonders that we do by depending on the kindness of strangers?
Yes, I think we would have just as robust, if not a much more robust, range of 'medical wonders' if we recognized that many of the best minds are more interested in fundamental research (Pasteur) or defeating an adversary (Salk) than just making money. Do you even have a counterpoint or counterexample that compares to the genesis of germ theory or the development of the Polio vaccine that was accomplished via the much-vaunted Profit Motive (TM) ?
Um, everything newer? You are pointing to discoveries from an earlier time where it was easier to make earth shattering discoveries because so much less had been discovered. There are still absolute wonders being created by pharma and tech companies all the time. Lipitor, Viagra, Prozac etc. are all wonder drugs that improved countless people's lives, and they were all developed by big pharma.
True story, the anticancer drug Paclitaxel was discovered by a botanists and synthesized by a chemist as part of a National Cancer Institute program.
I would have picked better examples.
Lipitor is part of the statin family. A chemical found naturally in red yeast rice, oyster mushrooms, and a type of bacteria.
Prozac is derived from the antihistamine diphenhydramine, a drug discovered by a chemist at the University of Cincinnati.
I'll concede you Viagra, although the fact that drugs for erectile dysfunction and male pattern baldness are the most sold medications on the planet is probably saying...something.
The vast majority of pharmaceuticals are invented either in universities, government labs or private research institutions like Cold Harbor Springs. The money for that research comes almost exclusively from government agencies like the NIH or various European agencies.* Corporate funding and private donations are a drop in the bucket.
Where pharmaceutical companies fit is that they take those discoveries and formulate drugs - i.e. finding the right balances of chemical to body composition, sourcing suppliers for those chemicals and running manufacturing and distribution networks.
While pharmaceuticals have labs that pay a lot more than the alternatives, working in a pharma lab is considered a huge step down in a researcher's career. That's why the pay tends to be higher - the work is dull, the science is routine and unexciting and the chances for a major, career-making breakthrough are slim. In the world of research science, the best and brightest absolutely do not follow the money. Most would rather have the shot at a Nobel.
* The NIH pays for a lot of research in Europe and a lot of European grants fund American researchers. Asian nations aren't really a player in this, yet.
Without that boring work, isn't the sexy, bold work the guys at the universities are doing basically useless? To hear about amazing discoveries in university labs all the time. They don't always wind up helping anybody.
Do you have a point here? Of course not all laboratory discoveries become marketed products. Many, instead, become the groundwork for future research which does lead to marketable products.
And, as to the question of whether universities need the drug companies, the answer is that they do not. A lot of major research universities are actually bringing everything but the marketing and distribution back in-house, because they believe they can do the formulation work better, faster and cheaper than the drug companies. Way too many promising discoveries have been left to rot because drug companies didn't see a large enough profit, so the medical research community is trying to work around them.
If you are looking for an example of the profit motive leading to bigger and better outcomes, pharmaceuticals and medical research is absolutely the wrong place to look. Maybe the military arms industry would be a better example.
True story, the anticancer drug Paclitaxel was discovered by a botanists and synthesized by a chemist as part of a National Cancer Institute program.
And is currently produced by neither route.
I would have picked better examples.
Lipitor is part of the statin family. A chemical found naturally in red yeast rice, oyster mushrooms, and a type of bacteria.
Liptitor (Atorvistatin) is fully synthetic, though inspired by a natural product (lovastatin).
Prozac is derived from the antihistamine diphenhydramine, a drug discovered by a chemist at the University of Cincinnati.
So it doesn't count if it was inspired by something else?
I'll concede you Viagra, although the fact that drugs for erectile dysfunction and male pattern baldness are the most sold medications on the planet is probably saying...something.
The vast majority of pharmaceuticals are invented either in universities, government labs or private research institutions like Cold Harbor Springs. The money for that research comes almost exclusively from government agencies like the NIH or various European agencies.* Corporate funding and private donations are a drop in the bucket.
Where pharmaceutical companies fit is that they take those discoveries and formulate drugs - i.e. finding the right balances of chemical to body composition, sourcing suppliers for those chemicals and running manufacturing and distribution networks.
While pharmaceuticals have labs that pay a lot more than the alternatives, working in a pharma lab is considered a huge step down in a researcher's career. That's why the pay tends to be higher - the work is dull, the science is routine and unexciting and the chances for a major, career-making breakthrough are slim. In the world of research science, the best and brightest absolutely do not follow the money. Most would rather have the shot at a Nobel.
The bolded runs contrary to my understanding/feelings, working as a grad student in medicinal chemistry.
So it doesn't count if it was inspired by something else?
It's not that they don't count, it's just that their discovery was facilitated by research within the public sphere; an influence SKM is trying to minimize. I'm just pointing out that his "miracle drugs" probably wouldn't exist without the benefit of publicly funded research.
At the same time, they probably also wouldn't exist without pharma research.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
What is wrong with Viagra? It was a game changer in a way that few modern drugs have been. Having a treatment for ED is a pretty big deal for people's psychological health and self concepts.
The vast majority of pharmaceuticals are invented either in universities, government labs or private research institutions like Cold Harbor Springs. The money for that research comes almost exclusively from government agencies like the NIH or various European agencies.* Corporate funding and private donations are a drop in the bucket.
Where pharmaceutical companies fit is that they take those discoveries and formulate drugs - i.e. finding the right balances of chemical to body composition, sourcing suppliers for those chemicals and running manufacturing and distribution networks.
While pharmaceuticals have labs that pay a lot more than the alternatives, working in a pharma lab is considered a huge step down in a researcher's career. That's why the pay tends to be higher - the work is dull, the science is routine and unexciting and the chances for a major, career-making breakthrough are slim. In the world of research science, the best and brightest absolutely do not follow the money. Most would rather have the shot at a Nobel.
The bolded runs contrary to my understanding/feelings, working as a grad student in medicinal chemistry.
Have a chat with your colleagues in genomics, genetics, biology and medical science. They'll have a vastly different take on this.
And since the vast majority of major papers leading to discoveries were published in those fields, they have a better take. Medicinal chemistry has had major advances - lot of important work in proteomics, small molecule discovery and chemical probes done recently - but it is not the vanguard of medical research.
What is wrong with Viagra? It was a game changer in a way that few modern drugs have been. Having a treatment for ED is a pretty big deal for people's psychological health and self concepts.
Yes, Viagra was a game-changer. So was Rogaine. I still wouldn't claim that they are "game-changers in a way that few modern drugs have been" when comparing them to drugs that actually, you know, save lives.
Unless you mean game-changers in the marketing and profitability sense, which I'd agree with, though I wouldn't really mark that as an unambiguous positive.
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
It's also worth pointing out that the R&D is very dependent on public universities and frankly I'd be perfectly fine with scrapping pharma as a private enterprise entirely for life saving medicine since their focus is on long term symptom treatment and not curing things
And it is worth pointing out a second time that this is a myth.
Which pharma company fills their R&D staff strictly with graduates from private universities?
because I was under the impression most of them were from public universities, and this isn't even going into how basically the entire US healthcare system is supported on the back of Medicare, who can't negotiate for drug prices
I think he meant the "their focus is on long term symptom treatment and not curing things" is a myth, not the support from publicly funded universities?
Yeah, that ABSOLUTELY is not a myth. If it isn't a myth, then drug company execs would be being fired by their shareholders because cures are the worst thing for a company to discover in terms of profit margins.
Look at 'super' bacteria. There is nothing super about them. They are just bacteria who have mutated a little so that the current arsenal of drugs we have don't work on them. However they can't change what they are. The mutation which protects them from one thing would make them more vulnerable to another, or decrease their efficiency as an organism to the point where the body itself could deal with them. It's not harder to develop new antibiotics than it was before, its just harder to test them because you can no longer just do whatever the hell you want.
"That is cool" - Abraham Lincoln
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
The AIDS cocktail is a "game changer" the HPV vaccine is a "game changer" Viagra is a novelty.
So wait, giant companies who have, over the past decade, demonstrated an incredible propensity to pursue short-term gains while ignoring long-term ramifications, would never pursue a course which would have crazy freaking short-term yield because the shareholders would get pissed at their new moneyhats?
That is a completely ridiculous theory. It's not even one of those, "Well, I don't have any evidence, but it totally makes sense!" things. You have provided no evidence, and it makes no sense.
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
Look at 'super' bacteria. There is nothing super about them. They are just bacteria who have mutated a little so that the current arsenal of drugs we have don't work on them. However they can't change what they are. The mutation which protects them from one thing would make them more vulnerable to another, or decrease their efficiency as an organism to the point where the body itself could deal with them. It's not harder to develop new antibiotics than it was before, its just harder to test them because you can no longer just do whatever the hell you want.
This, especially in the area of antibiotics just isn't true.
For example, why must one protective mutation necessarily increase vulnerability to an alternate antibiotic?
The vast majority of pharmaceuticals are invented either in universities, government labs or private research institutions like Cold Harbor Springs. The money for that research comes almost exclusively from government agencies like the NIH or various European agencies.* Corporate funding and private donations are a drop in the bucket.
Where pharmaceutical companies fit is that they take those discoveries and formulate drugs - i.e. finding the right balances of chemical to body composition, sourcing suppliers for those chemicals and running manufacturing and distribution networks.
While pharmaceuticals have labs that pay a lot more than the alternatives, working in a pharma lab is considered a huge step down in a researcher's career. That's why the pay tends to be higher - the work is dull, the science is routine and unexciting and the chances for a major, career-making breakthrough are slim. In the world of research science, the best and brightest absolutely do not follow the money. Most would rather have the shot at a Nobel.
The bolded runs contrary to my understanding/feelings, working as a grad student in medicinal chemistry.
Have a chat with your colleagues in genomics, genetics, biology and medical science. They'll have a vastly different take on this.
And since the vast majority of major papers leading to discoveries were published in those fields, they have a better take. Medicinal chemistry has had major advances - lot of important work in proteomics, small molecule discovery and chemical probes done recently - but it is not the vanguard of medical research.
It's also worth pointing out that the R&D is very dependent on public universities and frankly I'd be perfectly fine with scrapping pharma as a private enterprise entirely for life saving medicine since their focus is on long term symptom treatment and not curing things
And it is worth pointing out a second time that this is a myth.
Which pharma company fills their R&D staff strictly with graduates from private universities?
because I was under the impression most of them were from public universities, and this isn't even going into how basically the entire US healthcare system is supported on the back of Medicare, who can't negotiate for drug prices
I think he meant the "their focus is on long term symptom treatment and not curing things" is a myth, not the support from publicly funded universities?
Yeah, that ABSOLUTELY is not a myth. If it isn't a myth, then drug company execs would be being fired by their shareholders because cures are the worst thing for a company to discover in terms of profit margins.
Look at 'super' bacteria. There is nothing super about them. They are just bacteria who have mutated a little so that the current arsenal of drugs we have don't work on them. However they can't change what they are. The mutation which protects them from one thing would make them more vulnerable to another, or decrease their efficiency as an organism to the point where the body itself could deal with them. It's not harder to develop new antibiotics than it was before, its just harder to test them because you can no longer just do whatever the hell you want.
There...there is so much wrong with post just from a biological point of view.
Look at 'super' bacteria. There is nothing super about them. They are just bacteria who have mutated a little so that the current arsenal of drugs we have don't work on them. However they can't change what they are. The mutation which protects them from one thing would make them more vulnerable to another, or decrease their efficiency as an organism to the point where the body itself could deal with them. It's not harder to develop new antibiotics than it was before, its just harder to test them because you can no longer just do whatever the hell you want.
This, especially in the area of antibiotics just isn't true.
For example, why must one protective mutation necessarily increase vulnerability to an alternate antibiotic?
The vast majority of pharmaceuticals are invented either in universities, government labs or private research institutions like Cold Harbor Springs. The money for that research comes almost exclusively from government agencies like the NIH or various European agencies.* Corporate funding and private donations are a drop in the bucket.
Where pharmaceutical companies fit is that they take those discoveries and formulate drugs - i.e. finding the right balances of chemical to body composition, sourcing suppliers for those chemicals and running manufacturing and distribution networks.
While pharmaceuticals have labs that pay a lot more than the alternatives, working in a pharma lab is considered a huge step down in a researcher's career. That's why the pay tends to be higher - the work is dull, the science is routine and unexciting and the chances for a major, career-making breakthrough are slim. In the world of research science, the best and brightest absolutely do not follow the money. Most would rather have the shot at a Nobel.
The bolded runs contrary to my understanding/feelings, working as a grad student in medicinal chemistry.
Have a chat with your colleagues in genomics, genetics, biology and medical science. They'll have a vastly different take on this.
And since the vast majority of major papers leading to discoveries were published in those fields, they have a better take. Medicinal chemistry has had major advances - lot of important work in proteomics, small molecule discovery and chemical probes done recently - but it is not the vanguard of medical research.
I thought we were talking about drugs.
We are. The folks in those other fields are the ones identifying the signalling pathways, protein-to-protein interactions and other biological processes that the drugs target. In most cases, the medicinal chemists come in decades after the researchers in the other fields have pinpointed and verified potential drug targets.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like most of the life saving drugs that come about are just better versions of categories that already exist. Viagra was a whole new category. I think that's a big deal, personally, and not just for profits. It's a big deal because instead of just having a way to help people better than we could have before, it gives a way to help people that we could not help before.
Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like most of the life saving drugs that come about are just better versions of categories that already exist. Viagra was a whole new category. I think that's a big deal, personally, and not just for profits. It's a big deal because instead of just having a way to help people better than we could have before, it gives a way to help people that we could not help before.
True. Unfortunately this isn't a motivating factor to corporations to making that drug - it's the profits. That it is able to help people is a positive side effect.
Developing a new drug is...while not easy, it's not that difficult to start the process. You can synthesize drugs all day on a bench, it's nothing special at all. That's why a lot of drugs are originally synthesized on NIH monies or in public settings. Usually a combination of students, staff, and a few investigators are going to get through their animal models and even into clinical research T1 / T2 trials using public money.
Of each of those drugs that are synthesized, only a few are going to show any promise. You're talking a number of bench trials for each of those drugs for each specific application to determine if there is promise, animal trials to confirm some theoretical effectiveness, and of course safety. All that is done before you start working with humans, and you're talking thousands of dollars - at a minimum - for each drug that makes it through to even begin human trials.
But then you've still got tens / hundreds of thousands of potential drugs that could theoretically work in a specific application. You don't just give drugs to people and see what happens...there is a theoretical promise for your new drug and you get to T1 clinical research. Nothing special here. Most of the new drugs / treatments are going to fail at this point - they aren't more effective than standard of care, can't be properly administered, trouble keeping grants, trouble finding participants for your trial, side effects, etc. EDIT - actually effectiveness is not really part of T1 at all, my mistake for including that.
Now, you get through T1 - which is just determining if you can administer the drugs to people, in T2 you start seeing if the drugs actually work or not. This is still (normally) NIH / public money and grants with some corporate sponsorship - trials of a couple dozen or few hundred people. If there is some promise, somewhere in T2 / T3 the study will try to spin off into a private biotech firm supported by grants, venture capital, and maybe some big-biotech sponsorship if it's promising.
By the time you get to T3 / T4 trials, you have literally reached a point where you need the resources of a major corporation to continue the study. Public research institutes can't afford to fund those studies, and it's not part of their mission. There HAS to be a profit motive, because you're talking millions of dollars to get through T3 / T4 trials and ready to start marketing to population. If this biotech shows promise, there is a chance they will either get big money to continue, or get bought up by Pfizer, Merck, etc to continue the research.
The idea that private / public are two distinct areas of research is pretty misinformed. Pretty much all research goes along a continuum that starts with mostly public money and funding in the early stages, with private funding gradually taking over more of the costs as the promise of a particular drug / treatment increases. I'd be hard pressed to come up with any drugs developed in the past...oh, 50 years...that took place entirely or mostly in either realm.
Tl,dr: Studies are expensive, most of them fail, and there are a lot of them. Public and private funding have a role in development of pretty much everything, and trying to say private companies haven't done anything is a complete misunderstanding of how drugs move from bench to market.
Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like most of the life saving drugs that come about are just better versions of categories that already exist. Viagra was a whole new category. I think that's a big deal, personally, and not just for profits. It's a big deal because instead of just having a way to help people better than we could have before, it gives a way to help people that we could not help before.
Viagra wasn't really a new category.
It was an existing hypertension drug that people noticed had a useful and marketable side effect - namely popping boners.
Rogaine (Minoxidil) was originally a vasodilator that had the useful and marketable side effect of hair growth.
We don't just make drugs and start giving them to people, so - until we can do much better computer modeling - almost all drugs are going to be refinements of existing drug groups, or re-purposing of existing drugs to target 'side effects'.
The big things coming up are gene therapies. My wife was working on one study that was using viruses to create long-lasting nerve blocks for people suffering from chronic and localized pain. Stem cells are a biggie too.
Some day, possibly in our lifetimes, we'll look at the way we do medical research today and be like 'holy crap, people just dumped chemicals in their body and hoped they worked? Dark ages'.
The vast majority of pharmaceuticals are invented either in universities, government labs or private research institutions like Cold Harbor Springs. The money for that research comes almost exclusively from government agencies like the NIH or various European agencies.* Corporate funding and private donations are a drop in the bucket.
Where pharmaceutical companies fit is that they take those discoveries and formulate drugs - i.e. finding the right balances of chemical to body composition, sourcing suppliers for those chemicals and running manufacturing and distribution networks.
While pharmaceuticals have labs that pay a lot more than the alternatives, working in a pharma lab is considered a huge step down in a researcher's career. That's why the pay tends to be higher - the work is dull, the science is routine and unexciting and the chances for a major, career-making breakthrough are slim. In the world of research science, the best and brightest absolutely do not follow the money. Most would rather have the shot at a Nobel.
The bolded runs contrary to my understanding/feelings, working as a grad student in medicinal chemistry.
Have a chat with your colleagues in genomics, genetics, biology and medical science. They'll have a vastly different take on this.
And since the vast majority of major papers leading to discoveries were published in those fields, they have a better take. Medicinal chemistry has had major advances - lot of important work in proteomics, small molecule discovery and chemical probes done recently - but it is not the vanguard of medical research.
I thought we were talking about drugs.
We are. The folks in those other fields are the ones identifying the signalling pathways, protein-to-protein interactions and other biological processes that the drugs target. In most cases, the medicinal chemists come in decades after the researchers in the other fields have pinpointed and verified potential drug targets.
Sure. Most of the basic research is done in academic settings. I would point out that a large portion of that type of research is enabled by small molecules, but that's not really my point.
The vast majority of pharmaceuticals are invented either in universities, government labs or private research institutions
I still think this is basically untrue, unless one construes invented to mean "was initially inspired or enabled by" rather than "prepared and tested."
It's worth noting that "marketing costs" include literally the company's entire sales department, not just television ads.
So the middle-class pharma rep making 40-60k a year is included in that 30-odd percent.
Also bears mentioning that there's also some overlap between marketing and R&D.
Example: my old employer helped pharma companies make strategic decisions, like "should we invest in clinical trials in the US or the EU first?" or "should we pursue FDA approval for our antihistamine as an allergy drug or as a sleep drug?"
Whether a pharma organization called this "marketing" (because we're helping them make market decisions) or "R&D" (because we're applying strategy to drug development) was ultimately up to them.
R&D budgets can also include R&D into business processes, supply chain, manufacturing, and other things that might make drugs cheaper (or increase their profits) without actually being research on new drugs.
And then some pharma companies engage in what are called seeding trials, which is effectively a semi-public beta test for a newly approved (or about-to-be approved) medication. They know the drug works on disease X, but they invite physicians and patients to engage in a clinical trial for a new drug hoping that some of those physicians and patients convert into prescribers and customers. Ethically, a pharma company should include this in their marketing budget; many do, but some of them include it in their R&D budget.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
The vast majority of pharmaceuticals are invented either in universities, government labs or private research institutions like Cold Harbor Springs. The money for that research comes almost exclusively from government agencies like the NIH or various European agencies.* Corporate funding and private donations are a drop in the bucket.
Where pharmaceutical companies fit is that they take those discoveries and formulate drugs - i.e. finding the right balances of chemical to body composition, sourcing suppliers for those chemicals and running manufacturing and distribution networks.
While pharmaceuticals have labs that pay a lot more than the alternatives, working in a pharma lab is considered a huge step down in a researcher's career. That's why the pay tends to be higher - the work is dull, the science is routine and unexciting and the chances for a major, career-making breakthrough are slim. In the world of research science, the best and brightest absolutely do not follow the money. Most would rather have the shot at a Nobel.
The bolded runs contrary to my understanding/feelings, working as a grad student in medicinal chemistry.
Have a chat with your colleagues in genomics, genetics, biology and medical science. They'll have a vastly different take on this.
And since the vast majority of major papers leading to discoveries were published in those fields, they have a better take. Medicinal chemistry has had major advances - lot of important work in proteomics, small molecule discovery and chemical probes done recently - but it is not the vanguard of medical research.
I thought we were talking about drugs.
We are. The folks in those other fields are the ones identifying the signalling pathways, protein-to-protein interactions and other biological processes that the drugs target. In most cases, the medicinal chemists come in decades after the researchers in the other fields have pinpointed and verified potential drug targets.
Sure. Most of the basic research is done in academic settings. I would point out that a large portion of that type of research is enabled by small molecules, but that's not really my point.
The vast majority of pharmaceuticals are invented either in universities, government labs or private research institutions
I still think this is basically untrue, unless one construes invented to mean "was initially inspired or enabled by" rather than "prepared and tested."
The field is changing, but academia is leading the efforts in small molecule discovery. That's largely because of long-standing frustrations with private pharma companies, but also because the computers and data storage needed for such work have gotten cheap enough that public entities can fully engage in the research. Here's a good article on this from Nature.
One complicating feature of this, as mentioned in the above article, is that a lot of public research is commercialized through start-ups run by public researchers and partly owned by public entities. On the larger topic, we kind of got lawyered off the original point by SKFM - i.e. that the profit motive is the main spur of research and development.
Anyone who has spent any time looking into who and why of medical research will quickly determine that it is not the case. Hell, the Soviet Union was one of the biggest producers of scientific research in the world during its existence - seriously, they did some amazing science.
So it doesn't count if it was inspired by something else?
It's not that they don't count, it's just that their discovery was facilitated by research within the public sphere; an influence SKM is trying to minimize. I'm just pointing out that his "miracle drugs" probably wouldn't exist without the benefit of publicly funded research.
At the same time, they probably also wouldn't exist without pharma research.
Right. I was about to take issue with your prior post until I saw this.
Prozac is a good example because it's one of the first drugs that was developed using rational drug design techniques. Eli Lilly knew that antihistamines worked on depression; they knew generally which histamine receptors were responsible for that effect thanks to public research (and a large part of that credit should go to Julius Axelrod).
But it was Eli Lilly who ultimately paid for somebody to synthesize and test one antihistamine derivative after another until they found one that works, and they did this because they knew they could profit off of it.
I 100% agree with what zagrob said above:
Studies are expensive, most of them fail, and there are a lot of them. Public and private funding have a role in development of pretty much everything, and trying to say private companies haven't done anything is a complete misunderstanding of how drugs move from bench to market.
It is prima facie ridiculous to me to disregard the role of either the profit motive or the humanitarian motive in bringing a new drug to market.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Why would someone pay for what they can get for free?
Short answer: international treaties.
India has agreed to uphold international IP law. In the long run, this benefits India. If they're perceived as a rogue nation with regards to IP, then other richer countries are less likely to do business with them.
Sorry. That's horseshit. How many countries buy from China despite their long and current history of ignoring IP laws and treaties?
That's right. All of them.
The only people benefited by IP treaties are the US. Even your allies like Australia get massively shafted by any "free trade" agreement you get us to sign. In every case it's a case of us agreeing to honour your IP and you telling us fuck off when we ask you to respect ours.
If you did about 30 seconds of research into China's pharmaceutical industry, you'd see that they export virtually none of their pharma, that it is almost entirely used domestically. There are many reasons for that, but poor IP protection is one of the major drivers. Individuals may be happy to buy pirated goods; but governments, insurance companies, and large health networks won't.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
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Um, everything newer? You are pointing to discoveries from an earlier time where it was easier to make earth shattering discoveries because so much less had been discovered. There are still absolute wonders being created by pharma and tech companies all the time. Lipitor, Viagra, Prozac etc. are all wonder drugs that improved countless people's lives, and they were all developed by big pharma.
True story, the anticancer drug Paclitaxel was discovered by a botanists and synthesized by a chemist as part of a National Cancer Institute program.
I would have picked better examples.
Lipitor is part of the statin family. A chemical found naturally in red yeast rice, oyster mushrooms, and a type of bacteria.
Prozac is derived from the antihistamine diphenhydramine, a drug discovered by a chemist at the University of Cincinnati.
I'll concede you Viagra, although the fact that drugs for erectile dysfunction and male pattern baldness are the most sold medications on the planet is probably saying...something.
The vast majority of pharmaceuticals are invented either in universities, government labs or private research institutions like Cold Harbor Springs. The money for that research comes almost exclusively from government agencies like the NIH or various European agencies.* Corporate funding and private donations are a drop in the bucket.
Where pharmaceutical companies fit is that they take those discoveries and formulate drugs - i.e. finding the right balances of chemical to body composition, sourcing suppliers for those chemicals and running manufacturing and distribution networks.
While pharmaceuticals have labs that pay a lot more than the alternatives, working in a pharma lab is considered a huge step down in a researcher's career. That's why the pay tends to be higher - the work is dull, the science is routine and unexciting and the chances for a major, career-making breakthrough are slim. In the world of research science, the best and brightest absolutely do not follow the money. Most would rather have the shot at a Nobel.
* The NIH pays for a lot of research in Europe and a lot of European grants fund American researchers. Asian nations aren't really a player in this, yet.
Without that boring work, isn't the sexy, bold work the guys at the universities are doing basically useless? To hear about amazing discoveries in university labs all the time. They don't always wind up helping anybody.
Do you have a point here? Of course not all laboratory discoveries become marketed products. Many, instead, become the groundwork for future research which does lead to marketable products.
And, as to the question of whether universities need the drug companies, the answer is that they do not. A lot of major research universities are actually bringing everything but the marketing and distribution back in-house, because they believe they can do the formulation work better, faster and cheaper than the drug companies. Way too many promising discoveries have been left to rot because drug companies didn't see a large enough profit, so the medical research community is trying to work around them.
If you are looking for an example of the profit motive leading to bigger and better outcomes, pharmaceuticals and medical research is absolutely the wrong place to look. Maybe the military arms industry would be a better example.
And is currently produced by neither route.
Liptitor (Atorvistatin) is fully synthetic, though inspired by a natural product (lovastatin).
So it doesn't count if it was inspired by something else?
Yeah. I wouldn't have included that one.
The bolded runs contrary to my understanding/feelings, working as a grad student in medicinal chemistry.
It's not that they don't count, it's just that their discovery was facilitated by research within the public sphere; an influence SKM is trying to minimize. I'm just pointing out that his "miracle drugs" probably wouldn't exist without the benefit of publicly funded research.
At the same time, they probably also wouldn't exist without pharma research.
Have a chat with your colleagues in genomics, genetics, biology and medical science. They'll have a vastly different take on this.
And since the vast majority of major papers leading to discoveries were published in those fields, they have a better take. Medicinal chemistry has had major advances - lot of important work in proteomics, small molecule discovery and chemical probes done recently - but it is not the vanguard of medical research.
Yes, Viagra was a game-changer. So was Rogaine. I still wouldn't claim that they are "game-changers in a way that few modern drugs have been" when comparing them to drugs that actually, you know, save lives.
Unless you mean game-changers in the marketing and profitability sense, which I'd agree with, though I wouldn't really mark that as an unambiguous positive.
Yeah, that ABSOLUTELY is not a myth. If it isn't a myth, then drug company execs would be being fired by their shareholders because cures are the worst thing for a company to discover in terms of profit margins.
Look at 'super' bacteria. There is nothing super about them. They are just bacteria who have mutated a little so that the current arsenal of drugs we have don't work on them. However they can't change what they are. The mutation which protects them from one thing would make them more vulnerable to another, or decrease their efficiency as an organism to the point where the body itself could deal with them. It's not harder to develop new antibiotics than it was before, its just harder to test them because you can no longer just do whatever the hell you want.
That is a completely ridiculous theory. It's not even one of those, "Well, I don't have any evidence, but it totally makes sense!" things. You have provided no evidence, and it makes no sense.
This, especially in the area of antibiotics just isn't true.
For example, why must one protective mutation necessarily increase vulnerability to an alternate antibiotic?
I thought we were talking about drugs.
There...there is so much wrong with post just from a biological point of view.
I really don't know where to start.
We are. The folks in those other fields are the ones identifying the signalling pathways, protein-to-protein interactions and other biological processes that the drugs target. In most cases, the medicinal chemists come in decades after the researchers in the other fields have pinpointed and verified potential drug targets.
True. Unfortunately this isn't a motivating factor to corporations to making that drug - it's the profits. That it is able to help people is a positive side effect.
Of each of those drugs that are synthesized, only a few are going to show any promise. You're talking a number of bench trials for each of those drugs for each specific application to determine if there is promise, animal trials to confirm some theoretical effectiveness, and of course safety. All that is done before you start working with humans, and you're talking thousands of dollars - at a minimum - for each drug that makes it through to even begin human trials.
But then you've still got tens / hundreds of thousands of potential drugs that could theoretically work in a specific application. You don't just give drugs to people and see what happens...there is a theoretical promise for your new drug and you get to T1 clinical research. Nothing special here. Most of the new drugs / treatments are going to fail at this point - they aren't more effective than standard of care, can't be properly administered, trouble keeping grants, trouble finding participants for your trial, side effects, etc. EDIT - actually effectiveness is not really part of T1 at all, my mistake for including that.
Now, you get through T1 - which is just determining if you can administer the drugs to people, in T2 you start seeing if the drugs actually work or not. This is still (normally) NIH / public money and grants with some corporate sponsorship - trials of a couple dozen or few hundred people. If there is some promise, somewhere in T2 / T3 the study will try to spin off into a private biotech firm supported by grants, venture capital, and maybe some big-biotech sponsorship if it's promising.
By the time you get to T3 / T4 trials, you have literally reached a point where you need the resources of a major corporation to continue the study. Public research institutes can't afford to fund those studies, and it's not part of their mission. There HAS to be a profit motive, because you're talking millions of dollars to get through T3 / T4 trials and ready to start marketing to population. If this biotech shows promise, there is a chance they will either get big money to continue, or get bought up by Pfizer, Merck, etc to continue the research.
The idea that private / public are two distinct areas of research is pretty misinformed. Pretty much all research goes along a continuum that starts with mostly public money and funding in the early stages, with private funding gradually taking over more of the costs as the promise of a particular drug / treatment increases. I'd be hard pressed to come up with any drugs developed in the past...oh, 50 years...that took place entirely or mostly in either realm.
Tl,dr: Studies are expensive, most of them fail, and there are a lot of them. Public and private funding have a role in development of pretty much everything, and trying to say private companies haven't done anything is a complete misunderstanding of how drugs move from bench to market.
Viagra wasn't really a new category.
It was an existing hypertension drug that people noticed had a useful and marketable side effect - namely popping boners.
Rogaine (Minoxidil) was originally a vasodilator that had the useful and marketable side effect of hair growth.
We don't just make drugs and start giving them to people, so - until we can do much better computer modeling - almost all drugs are going to be refinements of existing drug groups, or re-purposing of existing drugs to target 'side effects'.
The big things coming up are gene therapies. My wife was working on one study that was using viruses to create long-lasting nerve blocks for people suffering from chronic and localized pain. Stem cells are a biggie too.
Some day, possibly in our lifetimes, we'll look at the way we do medical research today and be like 'holy crap, people just dumped chemicals in their body and hoped they worked? Dark ages'.
Sure. Most of the basic research is done in academic settings. I would point out that a large portion of that type of research is enabled by small molecules, but that's not really my point.
I still think this is basically untrue, unless one construes invented to mean "was initially inspired or enabled by" rather than "prepared and tested."
Also bears mentioning that there's also some overlap between marketing and R&D.
Example: my old employer helped pharma companies make strategic decisions, like "should we invest in clinical trials in the US or the EU first?" or "should we pursue FDA approval for our antihistamine as an allergy drug or as a sleep drug?"
Whether a pharma organization called this "marketing" (because we're helping them make market decisions) or "R&D" (because we're applying strategy to drug development) was ultimately up to them.
R&D budgets can also include R&D into business processes, supply chain, manufacturing, and other things that might make drugs cheaper (or increase their profits) without actually being research on new drugs.
And then some pharma companies engage in what are called seeding trials, which is effectively a semi-public beta test for a newly approved (or about-to-be approved) medication. They know the drug works on disease X, but they invite physicians and patients to engage in a clinical trial for a new drug hoping that some of those physicians and patients convert into prescribers and customers. Ethically, a pharma company should include this in their marketing budget; many do, but some of them include it in their R&D budget.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
The field is changing, but academia is leading the efforts in small molecule discovery. That's largely because of long-standing frustrations with private pharma companies, but also because the computers and data storage needed for such work have gotten cheap enough that public entities can fully engage in the research. Here's a good article on this from Nature.
One complicating feature of this, as mentioned in the above article, is that a lot of public research is commercialized through start-ups run by public researchers and partly owned by public entities. On the larger topic, we kind of got lawyered off the original point by SKFM - i.e. that the profit motive is the main spur of research and development.
Anyone who has spent any time looking into who and why of medical research will quickly determine that it is not the case. Hell, the Soviet Union was one of the biggest producers of scientific research in the world during its existence - seriously, they did some amazing science.
Right. I was about to take issue with your prior post until I saw this.
Prozac is a good example because it's one of the first drugs that was developed using rational drug design techniques. Eli Lilly knew that antihistamines worked on depression; they knew generally which histamine receptors were responsible for that effect thanks to public research (and a large part of that credit should go to Julius Axelrod).
But it was Eli Lilly who ultimately paid for somebody to synthesize and test one antihistamine derivative after another until they found one that works, and they did this because they knew they could profit off of it.
I 100% agree with what zagrob said above:
It is prima facie ridiculous to me to disregard the role of either the profit motive or the humanitarian motive in bringing a new drug to market.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
If you did about 30 seconds of research into China's pharmaceutical industry, you'd see that they export virtually none of their pharma, that it is almost entirely used domestically. There are many reasons for that, but poor IP protection is one of the major drivers. Individuals may be happy to buy pirated goods; but governments, insurance companies, and large health networks won't.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.