6 ms·

Researchers in pharma are working extremely hard and almost always in good faith. I know this is probably tongue-in-cheek but it's not true.

• toyg 5y ago
  Yeah it's not really researchers that I'm worried about, it's their bosses.
  • bun_at_work 5y ago
    Can you provide an example of a treatment people would like that 'big pharma' wouldn't produce because they couldn't make a profit on it? This is such a ridiculous argument, IMO. As a thought experiment consider something like cancer treatment. If some pharma company researcher found a way to 100% prevent or reverse cancer, why would the company hide that? In the best case, they could make a ton of money from it by selling it cheap to everyone. In the worse case, they could make a ton of money selling it to the ultra wealthy with an obscene price tag. If they tried to hide it, the researcher would share the information elsewhere, no?
    • rangoon626 5y ago
      The companies who make today's lengthy and expensive cancer treatments, are also making the mass-marketed personal care products that have carcinogens inside of them.
    • raesene9 5y ago
      Whilst I don't buy the malice (big pharma deliberately not curing things they could) argument, there's plenty of things they don't do 'cause they don't think they'll make a profit on them. Novel drug research is extremely expensive and time consuming, logically speaking a for-profit pharma company will assign its resources to the research which is most likely to make a profit. As a result rare conditions will not attract the research necessary to create drugs to treat them. To give you a concrete example, AFAIK there was never a vaccine for MERS which is a coronovirus which preceded COVID-19.
    • eganist 5y ago
      The practice is so widespread that the FDA had to create an incubator/accelerator to incentivize drug-making for rare conditions: https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/center-drug-evaluation-and-research-cder/rare-diseases-program https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/center-drug-evaluation-and-res... And that's separate from the Office of Orphan Products Development: https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/office-clinical-policy-and-programs/office-orphan-products-development https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/office-clinical-policy-and-pro... It's not a recent thing, too. Different programs have been enacted in the US going as far back as the Orphan Drug Act of 1983. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_Drug_Act_of_1983 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_Drug_Act_of_1983 Broader reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_drug https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_drug
      • bun_at_work 5y ago
        You're saying hiding the discovery of novel, profitable, drugs because profits from the existing treatment is widespread? I'm not saying the pharma companies pursue all possible opportunities to research/create new drugs, just that it's ridiculous to think if they did find one, they would suppress that information. It seems conspiratorial. The Orphan drug act or incubators you link don't contradict the point I'm trying to make, but maybe that's on me.
        • eganist 5y ago
          Your question: > Can you provide an example of a treatment people would like that 'big pharma' wouldn't produce because they couldn't make a profit on it? That's very different from: > You're saying hiding the discovery of novel, profitable, drugs because profits from the existing treatment is widespread?
    • jollybean 5y ago
      "This is such a ridiculous argument, IMO." ? You are the head of strategy presenting to Big Pharma CEO. You say 'Here are 5 new drugs which have potential for great impact, each will cost a billion. 4 of them are vaccines, which will be very inexpensive, and nobody will buy and we will lose money. One of them is a fairly expensive cancer treatment. Which one do you want to focus on boss?' Supply/Demand and just Basic Economics generally work their way into the system. Some drugs are much more profitable than others, many of them are not going to be profitable, and there's less incentive to work on them. Vaccines in particular. It's a big part of the equation we have to deal with.
    • UnFleshedOne 5y ago
      New antibiotics for one -- if they make a new one that has no resistances in the wild yet, doctors would avoid prescribing it as long as possible, only after all older drugs are tried, so the usage would be extremely low. Nobody wants to sink a few billion into something like that.
    • inglor_cz 5y ago
      Drugs work in economies of scale like everything else. I like to write and publish books, but only because I know that several thousand people are going to buy them (yeah, humblebrag...). I wouldn't bother with them if my audience was two orders of magnitude smaller. It is just not worth the hassle. Similarly, most programmers here probably work on projects used by thousands at least as well. Few people will put hours and energy into something that will only be used by, say, three users. Rare diseases suffer from the same problem. The cost of development of drugs under current regulatory regime is high and in case of rare disease, cannot be amortized later over a huge set of patients. Moreover, most promising drugs actually fail in human trials, but the costs are already incurred.
      • throwawayboise 5y ago
        I put a lot of time into things that are only used by one person: me.
        • ghaff 5y ago
          Some things are obviously useful for yourself. Indeed, sharing them can often be effort with no expectation of return. Writing a book for yourself may have some sort of forcing function to understand a topic. But mostly I wouldn’t write a whole book to do that.
    • enragedcacti 5y ago
      Two concrete examples of this I can think of are 1) use of Psylocibin (mushrooms) assisted Congitive Behavioural Therapy for curing PTSD, depression, anxiety, etc. we have seen extremely good results from this and pharma companies could have likely pushed it much much sooner 2) Biofeedback/Neurofeedback has been around for more than a decade and is under-researched, under-insured, and under-prescribed for treatment of a lot of mental issues from anxiety to post-concussive syndrome to ADHD. both of these can negate the need for a years or decades long reliance on SSRIs or stimulants.
      • TheLegace 5y ago
        I can tell you from first hand experience that neurofeedback is a life changing treatment. Far superior to ADHD stimulants which is a nightmare for some.
      • Closi 5y ago
        I don’t think it’s pharma companies responsibility to ‘push’ psylocibin - it sounds like that sits more between doctors, public/university pharmaceutical researchers and legislators.
      • dekhn 5y ago
        Sandoz's original explorations into LSD were medically focused and it was marketed (and distributed for free in high purity) for psychiatric indications, but after it grew in popularity an illicit drug, all pharma got out of the business of working with highly psychoactive compounds for decades because of the negative press assocations.
    • nijave 5y ago
      Antibiotics https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02884-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02884-3
  • dekhn 5y ago
    You ascribe far more rationality to the process of developing drugs than is actually applied. Pharma mostly avoids low-profit avenues, but at least partly because that would be a good way to go out of business. However, to suggest that they intentionally suppress researchers with the goal of reducing costs seems a bit far-fetched.
    • whatshisface 5y ago
      I don't understand the difference between intentionally suppressing researchers, which they are obviously not doing (that would be ghastly) and directing research towards the most profitable drugs, which they are obviously doing (to do otherwise would be bad business).
      • dekhn 5y ago
        the former is an ethics violation, the latter is just a good strategy to win against the multi-armed bandit (which is how resource portfolios are managed at pharma). many pharma do invest some of their portfolio into things that are unlikely to have short-term or any payoff, and many of them also maintain compassionate programs to get expensive drugs to people who wouldn't be able to otherwise afford them. They do this because they are highly profitable, which unfortunately is as much explained by their marketing acumen as much as it is by solid research and development.
        • whatshisface 5y ago
          Okay, so if I'm getting this straight, instructing researchers to not research unprofitable drugs is an ethics violation, while instructing them to research profitable ones is good strategy.
      • s1artibartfast 5y ago
        If you have finite budget and finite researchers, you allocate them where are the most ROI is. Researchers aren't settling sitting idly by.
    • toyg 5y ago
• dangerlibrary 5y ago
  Researchers need funding. The problem with "Big Pharma" is generally not with the intentions or capabilities of the researchers - it's with the funding.
• ldehaan 5y ago
  Found the big pharma PR guy. The people in pharma are 100% not in this for the right reasons. Not one. Look into Every Single one of these companies just a tiny bit and you'll see how absolutely evil they are and by working for them you are complicit. You don't have to agree with reality, but that's reality.
  • et2o 5y ago
    You have a cartoonish view of reality.
  • GuB-42 5y ago
    People working in big pharma do it for money. But guess what, I work for money too, and it is the same for >99% of people. But most people appreciate it when as a side effect, their work save lives.
  • chefkoch 5y ago
    Huh, if all people working in pharma are complicit with big evil, what is your alternative? No one should work in pharma?