blood on my thing

[Man at Work]

The development of a new medicine takes up to 12 Years.

 

In thime a lot of R&D is stopped because of various reasons (safty, side-effects etc)

 

So only ca. 1 out of 20 threads lead to a maketable drug.

 

A lot of drug-development comes "by accident" - they search for a specific cure and find a drug agaiunst something else.This is how Viagra was found!

 

After this, the patent (in Germany anyway) lasts only 12 years, after this it is up for grabs for the Generica-Companies.

 

In those 12 years, the drug must earn the money for its own development and for the R&D of all the drugs which have been stopped.

 

And now you wonder why medicine is so expensive!

 

In Germany we are killing the researching pharmaceutical companies - and still want new drugs for new illnesses. How is this going to work????? ::

 

And with this, Pastor MaW finishes his sermon

[Azmit]

Yes but pharmaceutical firms are private companies, and as such their objective is profit, not saving lives. Focus of research is often on potentially rewarding markets (illnessess affecting developed countries).

 

Proper medication should be available to all humans, regardless of their wealth.

[Guest lazyphil]

<<Yes but pharmaceutical firms are private companies, and as such their objective is profit, not saving lives. Focus of research is often on potentially rewarding markets (illnessess affecting developed countries).>>

 

If they don't save lives they cease to prifit, yes?

 

[Guest]

>>Yes but pharmaceutical firms are private companies, and as such their objective is profit, not saving lives.

>>Focus of research is often on potentially rewarding markets (illnessess affecting developed countries).

 

>If they don't save lives they cease to prifit, yes?

 

Not necessarily. Probably the most sold single medication in the world and the biggest cash cow for the drug company AstraZeneca was for years the heartburn medication Prilosec. From a profit perspective it was ideal. The condition did not kill the victims or even prevent them from working, it was unpleaseant enough to require treatment, and the drug just made you feel better instead of actually curing you... $$$

 

Wagner

 

[bibblies]

You're telling me! You should see the state of most of my pharma and biotech shares..

 

What's wrong with these utopian socialist idiots that think other people should take a risk, spend their money and time for what would be, without profit, charity work? If you want to go and spend your life working for a charity, good on you - go do it. Just don't try to force others to do the same. And don't get on the case of people that get off their arses to get involved in a business that happens to be connected with helping the wellbeing of others. Free enterprise works. If governments were responsible for producing soft drinks, do you think we'd have the range we have today? You may find that if you get what you want, you'll have many fewer medicines..

 

Reading through company reports, most seem to be providing AIDS drugs at low cost to many poorer countries. In South Africa, which has one of the highest percentages of HIV+ people in the world, free drugs were actually spurned for years by the South African premier, Thabo Mbeki, who insisted on a personal theory that these drugs made things worse. Shame on him.

[Azmit]

[color:"blue"] If governments were responsible for producing soft drinks, do you think we'd have the range we have today? [/color]

 

Sorry Bibblies, what the fuck do we need a range of soft drink when so many people do not have access to plain water ?

[bibblies]

Is this guy being serious?! If so, let's hope he's not going to be put in charge of the new world order where public bodies are the sole creators of new drugs, eh?

 

It's an example. Since it doesn't seem to be so clear to you, I'll clarify it: Free enterprise, left alone, melds human ingenuity and desire for reward into a machine that is good at creating a wide range of choices. It's not perfect but it's the best system we've got. A public regulated body would never be so creative or inventive or responsive to demand.

 

To illustrate my point, here's another example. (Big red flashing light! It's a fucking example!) Thinking of old Soviet Bloc Eastern Europe, I ask you compare the market in, say cars, to the free-market West. What choice of cars did we have in the West in 1988? Too wide a range to mention.. Now how about in the stolid regulated East? .. Well, er, you had the Trabant. A polluting, crappy unreliable piece of shit, and that's about it. Now what makes you think things would be any different if we put medicine into the hands of public bodies?

[Azmit]

Ok, first I don't see things as having only 2 alternatives, wild free market versus stalinist planned economy. There are plenty of possible in-betweens.

It is obvious you have to curb markets and keep them into certain boundaries, dictated by the general interest (like making rules forbidding use of toxic substances : less profit for the private company, but better for the general interest).

The question is, to which extent do we apply those boundaries and place general interest over profit ?

 

Personally I think this wide variety of consumer goods we relentlessly produce is quite stupid and a big waste of time and energy, but maybe all this waste is necessary to come up with the useful things, I'm not sure.

 

As for pharmaceutical industry, I think a lot of the research should be done by state funded projects in universities (and apparently it is already), I'm sure researchers themselves place research above profit, as long as there are enough funds to continue.

 

An example comes to my mind, medical research in Cuba specializes in vaccines and cures for tropical diseases (I don't remember which) that you find in Africa and for which nobody else cares because there is no market.

[bibblies]

Whatever their motives, generally the more socialist the economy, the fewer drugs produced. It's no accident that most drugs are produced by US and British companies, where the governments leave them alone to get on with it.

 

I'm being lazy here by not looking it up, but I think governments do provide various incentives for production of drugs that aren't otherwise economically viable. For example, I've got a holding in a company called Oxford Glycosciences, which has recently brought out a treatment for Gaucher's disease, a condition that affects only a handful of Ashkenazi Jews! By the way, Oxford Glycosciences is a small biotech company and that's an area a lot of big pharmas are increasingly looking to for ideas.

 

You can't rely on publicly funded bodies to get things done quickly. The public side of the Human Genome Project was going to take a leisurely 15 years before Celera came in to give it a competitive kick up the arse. The public body complained but guess what? The project then got completed in 2 years!

 

The only instances which I can think of where governments really need to play a part are those in which non-patentable treatments may be helpful. E.g. vitamins, herbal remedies.