"Secret Serum" Used To Treat Americans With Ebola 390
mrspoonsi (2955715) writes with news that the two Americans infected with Ebola in Liberia and transported to Atlanta for treatment were given an experimental drug, and their conditions appear to be improving. From the article: While some people do fight off the disease on their own, in the case of the two Americans, an experimental serum may have saved their lives. As Dr. Kent Brantly and missionary Nancy Writebol waited in a Liberian hospital, someone from the National Institutes of Health reached out to Samaritan's Purse, one of the two North Carolina-based Christian relief groups the two were working with, and offered to have vials of an experimental drug called ZMapp sent to Liberia, according to CNN's unnamed source. Although the Food and Drug Administration does allow experimental drugs to occasionally be distributed in life-threatening circumstances without approval under the expanded access or "compassionate use" conditions. It's not yet clear whether that approval was granted in this case or not. ... Brantly, who had been sick for nine days already ... [received] the first dose ... within an hour, he was able to breathe better and a rash on his body started to fade. The next day he was able to shower without help before boarding the air ambulance that flew him to Atlanta.
Re:ROI for drug development (Score:4, Insightful)
There are government grants available for such research. Not all research is done by people looking for billion dollar paydays. Some people just want enough funding to get the research done and draw a salary.
Re:Expert:Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People A (Score:4, Insightful)
The same reason the US funds a vast majority of drug research in general (at least as of now): It has the money, universities, companies, the property right protection, and other laws that enable people to spend decades working on something and then eventually getting a payday for it.
And much of the rest of the world piggy-backs on US research money and then demands that they get it at a discount or will just ignore the patents anyway. It is part of the reason drugs are so expensive in the US - the US subsidizes the rest of the world.
It would be great if there were 5 or 6 (or more) areas all working on the problems instead of very few. Europe certainly does some, but even with European contributions, their percentages are still quite small.
Some scale (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a lot of hype on this Ebola topic in the media.
Lets have some scale:
The population of Africa: 1 billion
http://worldpopulationreview.c... [worldpopul...review.com]
Number of people to die of Ebola in the past year: 887
http://www.usatoday.com/story/... [usatoday.com]
The number of deaths in Liberia alone during the last flu outbreak: 5,561
http://www.worldlifeexpectancy... [worldlifeexpectancy.com]
Re:ROI for drug development (Score:5, Insightful)
The drug is NOT ready. That's the whole point of this. They were given experimental "serum" which had not even reached Human trials (years away from them in fact, they had just recently reached simian trials after the mouse models which is essentially the very first step towards human trials). This stuff could have outright killed them. These two people subjected themselves to essentially untested experimentation in the hope of a miracle. They got lucky.
Had they tested this stuff on a bunch of Africans and they died can you imagine the bad press it would have generated? I can see the headlines now. "America tests drugs on poor Africans in unethical medical experimentation".
Re:Expert:Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People A (Score:4, Insightful)
Cut the marketing budget and the executive salary/bonus overhead and set up publicly funded drug trials and the final costs would plummet (even counting the public money... profit and patent monopolies are massive inefficiencies in the drug "market").
Then you can afford to get back on your meds. Win-win!
Re:ROI for drug development (Score:0, Insightful)
Perhaps an "incentive" for Pharmaceutical companies who are making money hand over fist with other drugs would be to make a drug that would cure or vaccinate against a horrible disease because, i don't know...it's the right thing to do?
80% of clinical trials fail in this country. Sorry I can't provide a quote as it's somewhat anecdotal, but it's the generally accepted rate.
If 80% of clinical trials fail for new drugs, then that means that there is hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of dollars going to products that never come out. The ones that do pass have to make up the difference in order to keep people on the payroll.
"the right thing to do" is not an acceptable currency to pay the salaries of the researchers and the cost of research.
Re:Expert:Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People A (Score:5, Insightful)
Moreover, the American government refuses to try and negotiate on price or bulk buy bargains. Australia subsidizes the cost of drugs, and negotiates aggressively on price with pharma companies since a drug on the PBS is guaranteed to ship huge quantities.
There is no reason American health programs can not do the same.
Re:Expert:Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People A (Score:3, Insightful)
Anytime something is "publicly funded" the cost shoot up.
Re:Secret for how long? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because it might have also killed everyone you gave it to? You do get that experimental drugs do that right? There was a case just recently where 4 guys were given an experimental Phase I human trial immunobooster, and within 20 minutes 2 of them were in multiple organ failure. The 2 who were not were given the placebo.
And this was in a trial where we actually had done everything right and the animal models suggested everything should be fine (people have gone over it with a fine tooth comb to figure out what went wrong there).
Re:Expert:Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People A (Score:5, Insightful)
Right, which is why medical treatment in the UK is so much cheaper (yes, even after you take into account taxes), than in the US.
Re: Expert:Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People (Score:2, Insightful)
Because it costs 50 cents to manufacture the pill. A car costs thousands to manufacture and buy. People don't like to think of development costs.
Re:Expert:Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People A (Score:5, Insightful)
As another researcher in the pharma industry: reread your post. Your entire post is only highlighting how poor of a job pharmaceutical companies do at effectively bringing drugs to market, all while adding the inefficiency of a 20% profit margin. The emphasis on profit alone also leads to too great of a focus on evergreening and low risk projects.
I've worked in a university lab that brought two (while I was there) drugs from design, synthesis, and screening through animal testing for the cost of an R01 ($250k) each. I realize that the clinicals are more expensive, but even $10M/drug is pretty small change compared to posted phama expenses. It's the bloat above the $10M per drug that makes them so expensive.
Hatred for drug companies comes from the (at least perceived) extortionate nature of the business. People feel as if their health is held ransom for another person's profit. Hospitals share the same ill feelings. It's especially potent because the people who profit the most from the whole scheme are already obscenely wealthy. Buying a car doesn't have the same "life or death" aspect to it.
Re:Expert:Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People A (Score:5, Insightful)
It's also shit like taking colchicine, which has been cheap and generic for years, doing a little extra research (which arguably was useful) and then using that status to bump the price up by 15 times [corante.com].
Those people taking the drug couldn't give a shit about the research - they take the pills, their gout gets better, that's their own personal research right there. What sticks in their craw is that their pills now cost $5 apiece.
That and the systematic hiding of research that is negative or equivocal, the deliberate creation of medicines that are just a couple of atoms different from an existing one, not because they'll be better but because they'll be on patent, etc, etc.
Big pharma does a lot of good, but it's kind of like picking gold coins out of a midden.
Re:Expert:Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People A (Score:3, Insightful)
One of the points of classical Capitalist Econ 101 is that, if a particular sector of industry consistently makes more than the average profits of business as a whole, tremendous, inexorable, possibly literally transhuman forces, (sometimes called the invisible hand) will push it back into line with the rest of the economy.
When a sector is making a 20% profit against an average for businesses of only about 3.4%, then classic Capitalism would say the forces trying to steer that sector back into line with the rest are about like a bunch of Mind Reading Giant Anime Robots, piloted by D&D 23rd level wizards and led by the Archangel Gabriel, doublewielding Nuclear Powered Uzis and riding the love child of Samatha Stephens and Hellboy.*
Which makes it really bizarre to see people defending the sector's record profits as though they believe fervently in this free market/invisible hand stuff, but think the problem can be solved by debating with those people on Slashdot who 'just don't understand'. Yeah, shooting straw wrappers at him will stop Godzilla, too. How does it feel when the same theory that tells you it's morally right to defend this enormous profit margin also says the forces acting to take it away are literally more powerful than the combined nuclear arsenals of all the nations?
Of course, you could believe that Adam Smith missed something there, but if that's so, where does this sense of absolute moral rightness, and the resulting tremendous need to fix all the people who disagree, come from?
* to use a metaphor that should be clear to the typical Slashdot reader.
Re:Expert:Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People A (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually what you see here is very well understood. You are seeing an inelastic market; that is if a drug or procedure will save you life, it does not matter of it costs $5 or $5000, you will find the money to pay for it. The reason why socialized healthcare drives costs down is because the government / the insurance company will bargain on your behalf. Since they are not the one who is going to die, they can not be extorted and can pit different drug makers against each other. Health care is one of the few areas where "the free market" does not work as naively expected.
Re:Expert:Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People A (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, this ignores the reaction of onlookers, who are given a clear message that they're worth nothing to their society, and as such don't owe it anything either. I wonder if a nation facing such a problem might turn to exaggerated forms of patriotism as a desperate attempt to win loyalty where none is deserved, such as making little kids swear their allegiance every morning?
Free market doesn't really seem to work anywhere anymore, seeing how economy is always in a crisis, unemployment has apparently become permanent fixture of it and even employed people can't afford the lifestyle of their parents without getting into debt.
Re:Expert:Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People A (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is it a problem to pay a few hundred bucks for a pill that will literally save your life
Probably because most of the world can't afford that. In fact millions in the US can't afford that, especially if they need a long course of treatment. It's basically telling them "we have a cure, but you are too poor, sorry". Rightly or wrongly I can see why they find that upsetting.