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DIY recipes to make your own expensive pharma drugs
- pizza 9y agoGood on them for including a blueprint of Naloxone
- fernly 9y agoMake your own meds at home? What could POSSIBLY go wrong?
- toomuchtodo 9y agoYou could die. Which could also happen if you can't afford the medication regardless.
- refurb 9y agoPretty much every pharmaceutical manufacturer has a free product program for patients who can't afford (or their insurance company won't pay for) the drug. I'd rather go that route than start a lab in my garage.
- toomuchtodo 9y agoThen why are people having to go without prescription medication they can't afford? EDIT: citations "Millions of adults skip medications due to their high cost Howard LeWine, M.D." https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/millions-skip-medications-due-to-their-high-cost-201501307673 https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/millions-skip-medication... "Almost 1 in 10 Americans Can't Afford Medications Says CDC" http://www.renalandurologynews.com/news/cdc-americans-can-not-afford-medications-eight-percent/article/395374/ http://www.renalandurologynews.com/news/cdc-americans-can-no... "Most Say They Can Afford Their Prescription Drugs, But One in Four Say Paying is Difficult, Including More Than Four in Ten People Who are Sick" https://www.kff.org/health-costs/press-release/most-say-they-can-afford-their-prescription-drugs-but-one-in-four-say-paying-is-difficult-and-more-than-four-in-ten-for-people-who-are-sick/ https://www.kff.org/health-costs/press-release/most-say-they... "Even the Insured Often Can't Afford Their Medical Bills" https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/06/medical-bills/530679/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/06/medical...
- KekDemaga 9y agoHave any examples of deaths? Should be thousands available.
- mustacheemperor 9y agoSure, here's 45,000. Did you actually Google your snarky response before calling bingo? https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/09/new-study-finds-45000-deaths-annually-linked-to-lack-of-health-coverage/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/09/new-study-fin...
- KekDemaga 9y ago45,000!?! you should easily be able to point out say 10 specific cases where lack of access to a drug killed someone in the last year right?
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago45,000 is greater than 10. One for the "never thought I would actually have to say this" list.
- KekDemaga 9y agoCertainly 10 specific cases would be an easy find right? Seriously go look. You can't find them. Studies like this claim cases like "well if we found this cancer earlier" but I'm looking for "he couldn't afford this drug so he died". Should be millions of them according to the rhetoric.
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago> Studies like this claim cases like "well if we found this cancer earlier" but I'm looking for "he couldn't afford this drug so he died". Why do you think that first group doesn't matter? You're hunting for cases where a person with an acute condition fell down and died on the spot because money-grubbing doctors callously refused to give them medicine. That doesn't usually happen in the US, because hospitals are required to administer emergency care without advance payment. That doesn't help the tens of thousands of people who have to choose between getting a checkup and paying the rent, or the checkup doc refers them to a specialist that costs $10,000, or they feel shitty after an accident but they know the bill for the emergency room visit will bankrupt them; so they gamble that it'll get better on its own, and by the time it's clear that it won't, it's too late for emergency care to save them.
- brightsize 9y agoOne such: https://www.gskforyou.com/ https://www.gskforyou.com/
- fjsolwmv 9y agoYou have to sell your garage and everything else before you qualify for free meds.
- refurb 9y agoActually, the income cut offs are quite high. For Novartis, if a family of two makes less than $150K and has no insurance, they get free drug.
- fjsolwmv 9y ago$100K,but still that's pretty high if they promise of fulfilled. https://www.pharma.us.novartis.com/our-products/patient-assistance/patient-assistance-foundation-enrollment https://www.pharma.us.novartis.com/our-products/patient-assi...
- mattmaroon 9y agoWell, there is a large segment of the population that thinks vinegar and various herbs are medicine so for them not much at least.
- hprotagonist 9y agoFrom the frontmatter: >"A toast to the dead, for children with cancer and AIDS/ A cure exists, and you probably could have been saved." I appreciate the can-do attitude of biohacking, but this is A. flatly wrong and B. a grave insult to every working pharma chemist. from http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2014/04/15/sweet_reason_lands_on_its_face http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2014/04/15/swe...: Looking someone in the eye and asking them if they really are accusing me of watching some of my family members die from diabetes, cancer, and heart disease while I was hiding the cures and collecting my paycheck is an uncomfortable conversation, but I’ve had it a few times. The only counterattack has been that no, they’re not saying that I personally have these things in my desk drawer, it’s the higher-ups, you know, them. “So how have I been working on these diseases for 25 years without rediscovering any of these cures?” I ask, and that generally winds things up. But I like to think (or to kid myself) that I’ve planted a slight seed of doubt. You need as much conviction in your voice as the quacks have, though, and that’s not easy, because they have a lot. Science has the evidence on its side, naturally, and that’s a lot, but conspiracy theorists and their friends have something to believe in, and that’s a very strong part of human nature indeed.
- mirimir 9y agoWhat about orphan drugs? It's true that more orphan drugs are being commercialized. But prices tend to be astronomical. Far better would be patent donation, and not-for-profit production.
- opportune 9y agoThen nobody will make them. Their prices would be even more astronomical than they already are without the large subsidies they receive.
- mattnewton 9y agoPlenty of people make money off generics. Even with lower market share you can charge slightly higher prices, but not too high or someone else will undercut. Today they have a monopoly.
- refurb 9y agoGo talk to an organic chemistry PhD student and ask them how likely this is to work. The answer is "not likely". Organic synthesis is difficult even for a trained expert. Hell, even the pharmaceutical manufacturers screw it up sometimes. And that's not even thinking about the possibility of unintended side reactions that create toxic products. Do a google search for "MPTP" if you want to read about amateur synthesis. A ton of people ended up with Parkinson's disease due to a bad synthesis.
- burntrelish1273 9y agoGotta bodge together, rent, borrow, steal or buy an old mass-spec that works, otherwise taking untested kitchen drugs shares a lot of risks in common with taking street drugs.
- olympus 9y agoWould a RamanPi [https://hackaday.io/project/1279-ramanpi-raman-spectrometer https://hackaday.io/project/1279-ramanpi-raman-spectrometer] work for verifying that you made the correct thing? It is probably lower cost than getting a hold of an old lab machine.
- burntrelish1273 9y agoTry it. :D Just better calibrate it often with whatever stable molecules are used for that and borrowing a known-good, real machine. Maybe record the uncorrected reading to get the drift (both kinds ;) at each calibration so you know if it's wearing out, eg, needs to be calibrated more often or replaced if it's a PITA.
- refurb 9y agoIR is a bit of a crude analytical method. It really only tells you if you have certain arrangements of atoms. It can't really tell you how pure it is. That said, if your IR looked just like the real IR, you have strong evidence that the drug you want is in there.
- jeremy_wiebe 9y agoDidn’t read the article but the headline immediately reminded me of this: http://www.cbc.ca/radio/thisisthat/fake-ontario-trees-teen-suit-trend-unicycle-cop-handmade-pharmaceuticals-1.3791725/handmade-homemade-pharmaceuticals-all-the-rage-at-new-brunswick-farmers-market-1.3791753 http://www.cbc.ca/radio/thisisthat/fake-ontario-trees-teen-s... “Homemade, handmade pharmaceuticals”.
- agotterer 9y agoMichael Laufer (One of the guys behind this project) gave a talk at HOPE 2016 about making and torrenting Daraprim. It is as an excellent talk and worth checking out. https://youtu.be/NjQ7yLmeqUw https://youtu.be/NjQ7yLmeqUw
- peteretep 9y agoAlways worth remembering “A Simple and Convenient Synthesis of Pseudoephedrine From N-Methylamphetamine“ http://heterodoxy.cc/meowdocs/pseudo/pseudosynth.pdf http://heterodoxy.cc/meowdocs/pseudo/pseudosynth.pdf
- tyingq 9y agoAside from being a bad idea there is no actual content describing how to synthesize anything. Any chemists about? Is it even plausible for the medications he's talking about, like Hep C treatments?
- refurb 9y agoNon-chemists make illegal drugs all the time. That said, the syntheses tend to be one or two steps and pretty basic. Could a random person do a 5 step synthesis using specialized reagents? No.
- mbroncano 9y agoMaybe I'm reading too much into it, but I'd like to suggest that possibly something is seriously wrong in our society if we need to revert to home made drugs instead of what pretty much the rest of the civilized world does: providing them to their citizens by means of a single payer, universal health care system.
- maxerickson 9y agoThis comes up all the time. Lots of systems are universal without being single payer. Or look at Medicaid. It has 50 payers (or more, not sure how territories are implemented). ~1/4 of Americans get health coverage through Medicaid.
- fjsolwmv 9y agoMedicaid is single payer in each jurisdiction. You can't effectively shop for a different Medicaid provider.
- refurb 9y agoWhat about the drugs that single payer systems won't pay for?
- hmwhy 9y agoI think home made reactors is a terrible idea. As a few comments have already pointed out, many things could go wrong in a synthesis—the fact that are trusting users to make a reactor to begin with is already an awful idea. In addition, chemists are not just trained to “make stuff”—the average person isn’t trained to handle toxic chemicals. Even if a person is aware of how to handle chemicals properly, accidents really do happen. A good example is that bromoethane is listed as a starting material for Daraprim on this website—Google for the MSDS for this chemical and you will know what I mean. Then there are the clean up and analyses after you have made something. No, it’s not as simple as checking melting points. I appreciate that people try to take it into the hands to fight what I personally consider to be unfair, but I think this is not how it’s done and it’s a terrible idea.
- delbel 9y agofrom what I gather this information is for people who can rationally establish their own risk/rewards envelope, invoking an ethical argument. the target audience would be the person disciplined in concepts (from the top of my head) Informed consent, Precautionary Principle, the Hippocratic Oath, the scientific method, and very good at challenging cognitive fallacies, fact based scientific evidence, etc. An argument could be made that if an individual, for whatever circumstances beyond their control, is unable to get the medicine they need, and if they are capable of understanding some key concepts, they should have the right to do this (if they have the means to do it).
- hvindin 9y agoAs an Australian, i.e. someone who lives in a country which doesn't assume that being poor is a good enough reason for someone to be allowed to die. As well as the brother of a scientist who often runs experiments involving the synthesis of new drugs, I had a torrent of extreme reactions to seeing that this site exists. 1. My immediate reaction was holy shit no, if a situation exists where your countrymen are trying to hack together potentially lethal drugs and medical procedures because you don't have facilities in place to save them, then whatever political decisions you are making, whatever trade deals you are signing, whatever wars you are fighting: stop ALL OF THAT SHIT AND FIX THIS FIRST. 2. Oh my god what a terrible way to die. I understand that this site is probably well-intentioned. I know that for someone with access to a pharmaceutical lab and who has experience in the small-scale manufacture of drugs intended for consumption by living creatures (experiments) including humans (clinical trials) it may make sense that we could just synthesise our own drugs. But failing to recognise that there are very real and very likely scenarios where people will die because you (or someone with your expertise) are not on hand to help them immediately if they fuck up. I can't help but think that the existence of this site is a net harm to the world, there's just no way the risk calculation is the same between a chemical engineer and a regular chap who needs medication as to the possibility of just making it at home. Making it seem like this is a thing you think that you should do just sounds like bad advice. But on the other hand, I'm so appalled by the ability of America as a nation to do terrible things such as let its citizens die from treatable illness, that this kind of makes sense. It just feels like the wrong problem to be solving. I mean, how about focusing on fixing the broken medical system, avoiding killing all the people who aren't white and making it just a little harder for insane people to get guns. While you're at it, you might even want to try and drop "racist as shit" from the assumptions of the rest of the world about your country.
- ianai 9y agoThis is awful in that sense. But maybe it paves a way for viable market entry for otherwise professionally staffed organizations? Ie a knowledge base they don’t have to pay a license to access. But that’s me groping for an upside. This speaks more than anything I could come up with what’s wrong with the current industry.
- 9y ago
- Mz 9y agoI boggle that a) this site exists and b) it is getting any traction on HN. Because this is guilty of all the things I have been accused of in terms of being irresponsible and dangerous and possibly profit motivated. How do sites like this seemingly thrive (Goop!) when doing something really conservative like talking about food chemistry and germ control is such insane drama? I just don't get it. (I have a form of cystic fibrosis and have spent a lot of years getting stronger and healthier using primarily dietary and lifestyle changes. I used to be really open about that, which was nothing but an ugly shit show every step of the way. I am probably making a huge mistake to comment on that. There seems to be zero path forward for me. I genuinely don't understand it.)
- mrkgnao 9y agoNurdRage, a relatively popular YouTuber, also replicated the Epipencil experiment on his channel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoQajOum6wA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoQajOum6wA The reason I'm bringing him up is that he synthesised Daraprim (pyrimethamine) from domestically-available materials over a period of ~2 years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddCuWX4vtOA&list=PLU79801KtVAU1XsTwHaKkqQoBgz_VYmPS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddCuWX4vtOA&list=PLU79801KtV... There's an NMR spectrum at about 12:08 in the last video in the playlist, which shows that he doesn't quite have medical-grade Daraprim, and that he'd need a lot of purification to get there.
- api 9y agoWhen we built the Internet this is the future we thought we were building. More please.
- Ice_cream_suit 9y ago"A DIY Epinephrine Autoinjector for just over $30" Do it wrong, and a child dies...
- dang 9y agoDiscussed extensively at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15467379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15467379, still on the front page.