6 ms·

People want to point the finger at structural problems with academia to explain why this wasn't caught earlier. But what about industry? Didn't they have a hu

by Imnimo 4y ago

People want to point the finger at structural problems with academia to explain why this wasn't caught earlier. But what about industry? Didn't they have a huge incentive to catch this sort of thing before they spend boatloads of money on clinical trials, and didn't they have some level of immunity to concerns about tenure committees and journal editors? If this was so easy to catch if it weren't for the troubling incentives of academia, why did drug companies still spend billions on it?

xiande04 4y ago
> why did drug companies still spend billions on it? Because they made even more off it.
- throwawaymaths 4y ago
  No, they lost money on it. Clinical trials aren't cheap.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- PeterisP 4y ago
  How? They aren't getting revenue until they can sell a drug that has passed clinical trials, and no clinical trials have been successful for Alzheimer's.
  - t90z 4y ago
- jcranmer 4y ago
  Only one drug has been even provisionally approved--Aduhelm--and that approval is so mired in controversy that everyone is refusing to pay for it, so I doubt its company has made even a million dollars in revenue off of it. No, Alzheimer's has been a multibillion dollar sinkhole for drug development cash with absolutely nothing to show for it.
throwawaymaths 4y ago
> why did drug companies still spend billions on it? Due dill is hard. Why did no one catch ubeam? Why is energous still a thing? Why has no one called out LAZR on their nonsense?
mbreese 4y ago
Because of the potential upside. If your potential market is “all aging people”, that’s a pretty big market. Even better when you realize that as people are older, they have more money, so the market you’re targeting tends to have more money to spend on medical expenses. Now, couple that with a highly competitive landscape where the first to market will capture the vast majority of that market and you can see how some steps might get skipped. Finally, if we did have random results in clinical trials, if you had 20 companies running a trial, you could expect at one of them to randomly have a positive trial (p <= 0.05). So you could have “promising” results for a small trial that would only fail once you had a larger number of participants. The market incentives and potential for lost opportunities were probably enough to justify a larger risk for some companies.
bhk 4y ago
According to the article, the research in question did not result in any clinical trials.
nl 4y ago
There were no clinical trials targeting this result. From the linked article: > Did the 56 Work Lead to Clinical Trials? > [snip] And the answer is that no, I have been unable to find a clinical trial that specifically targeted the AB56 oligomer itself It was industry (well short traders) that led to this being uncovered: > He was originally hired by two other neuroscientists who also sell biopharma stocks short - my kind of people, to be honest - to investigate published research related to Cassava Sciences and their drug Simufilam, and that work led him deeper into the amyloid literature.

by Imnimo 4y ago

xiande04 4y ago

> why did drug companies still spend billions on it? Because they made even more off it.

throwawaymaths 4y ago
No, they lost money on it. Clinical trials aren't cheap.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
PeterisP 4y ago
How? They aren't getting revenue until they can sell a drug that has passed clinical trials, and no clinical trials have been successful for Alzheimer's.
- t90z 4y ago
jcranmer 4y ago
Only one drug has been even provisionally approved--Aduhelm--and that approval is so mired in controversy that everyone is refusing to pay for it, so I doubt its company has made even a million dollars in revenue off of it. No, Alzheimer's has been a multibillion dollar sinkhole for drug development cash with absolutely nothing to show for it.

throwawaymaths 4y ago

> why did drug companies still spend billions on it? Due dill is hard. Why did no one catch ubeam? Why is energous still a thing? Why has no one called out LAZR on their nonsense?

mbreese 4y ago

Because of the potential upside. If your potential market is “all aging people”, that’s a pretty big market. Even better when you realize that as people are older, they have more money, so the market you’re targeting tends to have more money to spend on medical expenses. Now, couple that with a highly competitive landscape where the first to market will capture the vast majority of that market and you can see how some steps might get skipped. Finally, if we did have random results in clinical trials, if you had 20 companies running a trial, you could expect at one of them to randomly have a positive trial (p <= 0.05). So you could have “promising” results for a small trial that would only fail once you had a larger number of participants. The market incentives and potential for lost opportunities were probably enough to justify a larger risk for some companies.

bhk 4y ago

According to the article, the research in question did not result in any clinical trials.

nl 4y ago

There were no clinical trials targeting this result. From the linked article: > Did the 56 Work Lead to Clinical Trials? > [snip] And the answer is that no, I have been unable to find a clinical trial that specifically targeted the AB56 oligomer itself It was industry (well short traders) that led to this being uncovered: > He was originally hired by two other neuroscientists who also sell biopharma stocks short - my kind of people, to be honest - to investigate published research related to Cassava Sciences and their drug Simufilam, and that work led him deeper into the amyloid literature.