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https://undark.org/article/peak-pharma-drug-discovery/ https://undark.org/article/peak-pharma-drug-discovery/ Offers a fair amount of substance to back the not

https://undark.org/article/peak-pharma-drug-discovery/ https://undark.org/article/peak-pharma-drug-discovery/ Offers a fair amount of substance to back the notion that in general, medicine is going to be breathtakingly expensive in the near future. The state of biological and novel treatments now seem to support that notion. If you want to say that may change, even reverse, you need to offer more than personal incredulity to be convincing.

philipkglass 9y ago
The article claims that the costs for developing small-molecule drugs are soaring, as the number of druggable targets without good existing drugs falls and the difficulty of finding something sufficiently improved and new goes up. It also claims that the dwindling number of molecules that do make it to the market are going to increasingly be targeting small patient populations and charging enormous sums while still under patent to make up for those huge development costs. I agree with all that. It doesn't say that small-molecule drugs developed today will remain expensive after the patents expire. Small molecule drugs discovered now should have approximately the same manufacturing cost as those discovered 10 years ago, even though the discovery cost has gone up a lot. So this is not going to make medicine in general breathtakingly expensive; in our lifetimes most people will never have the rare disorders that orphan drugs target, and in a couple of decades the exclusivity will be gone anyway. I don't even think anyone expects a simple "take one pill per day" small molecule drug to prevent deleterious effects of aging. It would be great if that happened, of course. It couldn't be monopolized after the patent expires and it would be the complete opposite of an orphan drug; nearly everyone is going to suffer from aging eventually. More likely IMO it'll take genetic interventions, biologics, and a bunch of analytical techniques and frequently adjusted treatments to suppress deleterious aging effects, if it's possible at all.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  First point: Get used to this. Moderately-priced mass-market drugs will disappear. Or rather, they will go off-patent and become generics. With no R&D expenses to recoup, they will become cheap commodities, costing a few dozen or hundred dollars per treatment. New drugs, especially those protected from competition by the Orphan Drug Act, will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. Don’t be surprised when the first million-dollar treatment hits the market. Which dovetails with: These developments are no kind of tragedy — drugs cannot do much more to lengthen human lifespan. Nor are these developments the result of a conspiracy or of unusual levels of greed. They are just the end-stage of the depletion of a resource. We are specifically talking about life extension, and the claim is that the modern pharmacopoeia is moving away from traditional drugs, to far more expensive alternatives with more therapeutic potential.

philipkglass 9y ago

The article claims that the costs for developing small-molecule drugs are soaring, as the number of druggable targets without good existing drugs falls and the difficulty of finding something sufficiently improved and new goes up. It also claims that the dwindling number of molecules that do make it to the market are going to increasingly be targeting small patient populations and charging enormous sums while still under patent to make up for those huge development costs. I agree with all that. It doesn't say that small-molecule drugs developed today will remain expensive after the patents expire. Small molecule drugs discovered now should have approximately the same manufacturing cost as those discovered 10 years ago, even though the discovery cost has gone up a lot. So this is not going to make medicine in general breathtakingly expensive; in our lifetimes most people will never have the rare disorders that orphan drugs target, and in a couple of decades the exclusivity will be gone anyway. I don't even think anyone expects a simple "take one pill per day" small molecule drug to prevent deleterious effects of aging. It would be great if that happened, of course. It couldn't be monopolized after the patent expires and it would be the complete opposite of an orphan drug; nearly everyone is going to suffer from aging eventually. More likely IMO it'll take genetic interventions, biologics, and a bunch of analytical techniques and frequently adjusted treatments to suppress deleterious aging effects, if it's possible at all.

QAPereo 9y ago
First point: Get used to this. Moderately-priced mass-market drugs will disappear. Or rather, they will go off-patent and become generics. With no R&D expenses to recoup, they will become cheap commodities, costing a few dozen or hundred dollars per treatment. New drugs, especially those protected from competition by the Orphan Drug Act, will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. Don’t be surprised when the first million-dollar treatment hits the market. Which dovetails with: These developments are no kind of tragedy — drugs cannot do much more to lengthen human lifespan. Nor are these developments the result of a conspiracy or of unusual levels of greed. They are just the end-stage of the depletion of a resource. We are specifically talking about life extension, and the claim is that the modern pharmacopoeia is moving away from traditional drugs, to far more expensive alternatives with more therapeutic potential.