Former Intel CEO Rips Medical Research

Himuanam writes "Former Intel CEO Grove rips on the medical research community, contrasting their lack of progress with the tech industry's juggernaut of breakthroughs over the past half-century or so. 'On Sunday afternoon, Grove is unleashing a scathing critique of the nation's biomedical establishment. In a speech at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, he challenges big pharma companies, many of which haven't had an important new compound approved in ages, and academic researchers who are content with getting NIH grants and publishing research papers with little regard to whether their work leads to something that can alleviate disease, to change their ways.'"

You are talking out of your ass

[Anonymous Coward]

"There is no financial interest in developing new drugs when old drugs are still protected under obscenely long lasting patents."

By the time a drug gets through FDA approval, over 10 years of your patent life is gone. That's before yopu've sold the first pill. So now your are left with less than ten years to reocover billions in R&D money. Without patents there would be no pharmaceutical industry.

Re:Breakthroughs?

[stox]

There may already be a breakthrough for Crohn's patients. There is a new drug called Tysabri which has been shown to be very efficacious in treating Crohn's, and is expected to be approved by the FDA in a few months.

Disclaimer: I am a shareholder in Elan, the inventor of Tysabri.

Re:Breakthroughs?

[Hal_Porter]

Crohns disease is very nasty - I've met people who have it.

Do you know about this

http://www.ars.usda.gov/research/publications/publications.htm?SEQ_NO_115=159812 [usda.gov]

There's a parasitic worm that can reproduce in pig intestines but not in human ones. It knows how to inhibit the host immune system to have a peaceful life. There have been clinical trials of worm eggs as a treatment fo Crohns -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helminthic_therapy [wikipedia.org]

Hookworm depend upon a period of eight to ten days outside the host within narrow environmental parameters to become infectious after being passed in stool. Trichuris suis is similar to the human whipworm Trichuris trichiura, but its normal host is pigs. T. suis can colonize people but only for a short term and the worms cannot replicate in people.

For this reason treatment with TSO requires regular doses, at intervals of two weeks. Treatment with hookworm requires inoculation at intervals of approximately five years. This is because the average life expectancy of necator americanus is 3-10 years.

Crohn's Disease and Ulcerative Colitis Trichuris Suis Ova Trial results

A 24 week trial with 29 Crohn's disease patients showed remarkable results. After 24 weeks 79.3% of the patients showed a response to the treatment and 72.4% of the patients were in remission. 100% of patients which were on immunosupressive treatment at the time of the study showed a response to the treatment after 24 weeks.

A double-blind, placebo-controlled trial with 59 Ulcerative Colitis patients was done by the same group of researchers. Combining data of the trial, 47.8% of the patients given helminths showed a response compared to 15.4% of those who received a placebo. No side effects or complications were reported.

Re:Maybe fix your health care "system" first?

[Rob Simpson]

The grandparent was complaining that "medical procedures are insanely expensive and the equipment and medicine costs are through the roof" before making the laughable statement that "it's not like medicine got any better in the last 30 years".

From It's The Prices, Stupid: Why The United States Is So Different From Other Countries [healthaffairs.org]:

Monopoly power allows sellers to raise prices above those they would obtain in perfectly competitive markets. In the jargon of economics, they are thus able to earn "rents," defined as the excess of the prices actually received by sellers above the minimum prices the sellers would have to be paid to sell into the market. Countries differ in the degree to which they try to whittle away at the rent earned on the supply side through the creation of market power on the buy (monopsony) side of the market. A single-payer system would be called a "pure monopsony."

In the U.S. health system, for example, money flows from households to the providers of health care through a vast network of relatively uncoordinated pipes and capillaries of various sizes. Although the huge federal Medicare program and the federal-state Medicaid programs do possess some monopsonistic purchasing power, and large private insurers may enjoy some degree of monopsony power as well in some localities, the highly fragmented buy side of the U.S. health system is relatively weak by international standards. It is one factor, among others, that could explain the relatively high prices paid for health care and for health professionals in the United States.

In comparison, the government-controlled health systems of Canada, Europe, and Japan allocate considerably more market power to the buy side. In each of the Canadian provinces, for example, the health insurance plans operated by the provincial governments constitute pure monopsonies: They purchase (pay for) all of the health services that are covered by the provincial health plan and used by the province's residents.

Of course, Medicare is also forbidden from using its buying power to lower costs, anyway [nytimes.com].

Re:Basic Research

[riprjak]

Ahh! Stomach ulcers; great example. The cure for this was discovered because someone, an Australian (so probably excluded from the chaps big pharma is lazy rant), discovered the CAUSE, making the development of a treatment trivial.

TFA is fundementally suggesting (IMO) that there is too much focus on what we think we know and not enough on what we don't, insufficient root cause research. Indeed, your example of the success of curing Stomach Ulcers is a clear case which SUPPORTS the Basic Research arguement. :)
err!
jak.

Crohns & ED

[gbulmash]

Minoxidil was a heart medication. Growing hair on bald spots was a side effect that the pharmas did the trials on so they could sell it as a baldness cure.

Viagra... blood pressure medication. Boners were a side effect.

A number of the medications you rail against as fluff were actually discovered while trying to fight something more important. They turned out to be better at the fluff than the intended purpose, but fluff makes money too, and gears were switched so they got marketed for the side effect instead of the intended effect..

Re:Basic Research

[badasscat]

Just one more example - a couple years ago, I had two spontaneous pneumothoraces (collapsed lung) in the span of six months. That calls for surgery to repair it. Even 10 years ago, I would have been looking at a thoracotomy - basically the same as open heart surgery, but for the lungs. They make a large incision, push your ribs out of the way (ie. break them) and then work on your lungs out in the open.

Instead, with modern advancements I was able to have the VATS procedure. This involves three tiny incisions and the insertion of a small camera to help the surgeon work. It's still a painful recovery, but there's a lot less interior trauma.

So it's BS to say there have been no advancements made over the last 20-30 years. Look at our life expectancy over that time - it's only gone up. That's not because we're net healthier (true, we smoke less, but then we're also much more obese), it's because we're eradicating or controlling more and more diseases, we're performing fewer and safer surgeries, and we're using more effective medications (yes, even for so far incurable diseases like HIV).

In fact, one of the things most people don't realize is that almost all of our life expectancy gains over the last 100 years have been due to disease control, not better overall health. In 1900, lots of people made it to 70 or 80 years old before death, but lots of people died when they were 20 from things like polio, smallpox and TB. Infant mortality was also much higher than it is now. In other words, we're living longer lives because of the health care industry, not because we're all eating better food.

That's to say nothing of modern pain management. Say what you want about oxycontin, I don't know how I would have gotten through the first six months after my surgery without it. A lot of modern medicine is focused on quality-of-life issues, which are important issues. 20 years ago, a doctor would have said to just live with it; the pain is good, means your nerves are coming back. The current thinking is it's not enough to just save a person's life, it's also about giving them a life worth living. After my pain meds ran out the first two weeks after my lung surgery, I was in absolute hell until I made it back to the doctor and got my prescription for oxycontin. People who have never gone through major surgery have no idea what real pain is like. Oxycontin made life bearable until I healed well enough to get off it (and seriously, it was about a year).

The pharmaceutical industry has its share of problems. But it's just way off base to say there have been no advancements over the past however many decades.