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One of the great successes of modern medicine. When I first started treating Hepatitis C patients in 1995 our Hepatitis C treatments had terrible side effects
by uslic001 3y ago
One of the great successes of modern medicine. When I first started treating Hepatitis C patients in 1995 our Hepatitis C treatments had terrible side effects and rarely worked after 48 weeks of treatment. Now the treatments are 98% effective in 8-12 weeks and have minimal side effects. People need to stop saying that big pharma doesn't find cures.
- spondylosaurus 3y agoOne caveat to "big pharma finds cures" is that, to my understanding, a lot of the research is done via public institutions, big pharma just handles the manufacturing and distribution. I know adalimumab's discovery was funded (at least in part) by government grants, but Humira still made AbbVie richer than god.
- sudosysgen 3y agoBig Pharma also often handles the clinical trials and approvals. I don't know if there is a mechanism for a public lab to get approval for a medicine? Probably if we found a way to drive down the cost of clinical trials, we'd be able to structure the system in a way to eliminate the middle-men here, but that's much easier said than done.
- spondylosaurus 3y agoAh, good point... are clinical trials expensive to run?
- sjducb 3y agoA couple of billion per drug.
- PeterisP 3y agoThey are a bit more than half of the total drug R&D costs, so they cost more than all the research, experimental synthesis and pre-clinical experiments combined. If you've discovered a drug which works in vitro and on animals, and want to start clinical trials, you're not even halfway done.