Canada's Ebola Vaccine Nets Millions For Tiny US Biotech Firm 70
Anita Hunt (lissnup) writes: Iowa-based NewLink Genetics has secured a US$50million deal with pharmaceutical giant Merck for the experimental Ebola vaccine developed by Canadian government scientists. NewLink bought the exclusive commercial licensing rights to Canada's VSV-EBOV in 2010 with a milestone payment of just US$205,000. This is an interesting new twist in a story we've discussed previously, and which continues to draw media attention.
Re:Big business (Score:4, Insightful)
NewLink Genetics didn't seem that big.
Canada just made a very bad deal with them. Then again hindsight and all that, an unproven ebola vaccine was worth less in 2010 than in 2014...
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NewLink Genetics didn't seem that big.
Canada just made a very bad deal with them. Then again hindsight and all that, an unproven ebola vaccine was worth less in 2010 than in 2014...
The Prime Minister is anti-science so I suspect he doubted the ebola vaccine would prove useful. The fact a private company will set the price of the vaccine developed by taxpayer-funded research is egregious.
by math I take it you mean (Score:2)
Oh yeah, almost forgot about Ebola... (Score:5, Insightful)
...since it's no longer the crisis du jour.
What with the elections over, everyone stopped talking about it.
Like it magically no longer mattered. And the disease just went away.
(of course, it'll raging in Africa...but apparently we dont care about that)
And the promised massive epidemic sweeping the nation....never materialized.
Why, it's almost like all those people at the CDC....they actually knew what they were talking about....after 40 years of experience....
I'm just shocked. Absolutely shocked that a virus whos primary factor in transmission is poor hygeine in poor countries couldnt stand up to the healthcare system in an advanced nation...or even the US*. And all that fear mongering, and calls for travels bans, and mandatory quarentines for people who werent sick wasnt necessary.
SHOCKING I SAY!
Hmmm. I wonder if the talking heads and politicians will ever get around to admitting they were wrong, and apologizing.
(*its a joke! lighten up)
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BTW, have you heard? The new Benghazi report is out.
And Fox has already uncovered the sorry truth:
The White House has apparently gotten to the House GOP somehow, and made them part of the conspiracy/coverup.
This thing runs so deep that even Mike Rogers and Darrel Issa are part of it!
I mean, it's the only way to explain a final report that debunks rather than confirms all their conspiracy theories about the incident.
And its just amazing how competent and clever at conspriacies this incomepetent and ignorant
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unfortunateley, while Fox was the epicenter of the worst of the nutjobbery, everyone got in on the act.
and Fox actually had one of the shining lights of rationality in Shep Smith.
its just too bad his fellow employees didnt listen to him, and kept spouting crackpotterys about how Obama wanted us to be infected to make us feel Africa's pain....
But Shep Smith has a sort of record for being that voice ( http://mediamatters.org/blog/2... [mediamatters.org] ), and its a bit amazing that he still has his job after not towing the com
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He is there token voice of reason.
All the fear monger shows have one in order to seem like that are fair and balanced.
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The best thing is when they intentionally play off sane, informed people as denialistic nutters a la "Ancient Aliens"
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...And the promised massive epidemic sweeping the nation....never materialized. Why, it's almost like all those people at the CDC....they actually knew what they were talking about....after 40 years of experience....
Uh, I hope you were joking here too, since according to the very organization you cite here, we should be rapidly approaching around half a million cases of Ebola by January. I believe they were the first (only?) people to come to the table with infection estimates north of a million. Of course, the news orgs will do their best to sensationalize that, but it does not change the source.
This is also the same organization clearing infected people to fly on commercial airplanes, as well as defining what "good
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We have no experience curing Ebola.
We have lots of experience trying to keep people alive while what's left of their immune system defeats the virus.
It helps if the people who catch it are fit and well before they catch it.
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You know most diseases aren't cured by drugs, but by the immune system. The drugs just help out by making you feel better so you don't feel so terrible and harm your immune system. E.g., the painkillers and all that make it easier to get rest so you're not so worn down that your immune sy
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"It helps if the people who catch it are fit and well before they catch it."
Depends on what you mean by fit and well. Being seriously immunocompromised probably wont help, but a major way Ebola kills is by triggering a cytokine storm. Ebola attacks the immune system in a very unpleasant way inhibiting many of the standard responses to a viral infection. As a result when confronted by Ebola the immune system often responds with its last resort 'WMD', a cytokine storm which might be described as setting the i
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No im not forgetting anything. the CDC's definition and list of procedures is all but irrelevent if the people performing it arent adequately trained and prepared, as was the case at the Texas hospital. again, the blame lies in the local hospital making a series of errors and mistakes. an expert giving you advice directions is all but irrelevent if you dont listen him, which is pretty much the core point i was making.
as for luck, we have been lucky only in the fact its rarely travelled outside Africa. our a
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50 MILLION DOLLARS! (Score:4, Insightful)
To read the topic you have to first put a little finger near your mouth.
Merck Revenue in 2011 alone was a thousand times that.
The first $500k of the deal were to pay the golden pen they used to sign it. The second $500K, paid dinner, cognac, cigars and the first round of whores.
Re:50 MILLION DOLLARS! (Score:4, Insightful)
Merck revenue is irrelevant.
Flipping something that cost you $205,000 for $50,000,000 is the relevant part. That usually makes the guy who sold you it for $205,000 look a little stupid.
Of course an experimental ebola vaccine wasn't worth that much in 2010 since the Africans needing it then didn't have lots of cash to pay for it. However, $200k isn't a huge amount of money for a government either, so you would hope the reason for selling the rights was so that a private party would actually do something to move the thing forward rather than just sitting on it and doing nothing until a white guy got infected and the ebola money jackpot triggered.
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The ultimate optimist in me is secretly hoping that people who just want to get some good done in the world are playing the selfish idiots' paranoia to reduce a long-standing humanitarian issue.
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Of course an experimental ebola vaccine wasn't worth that much in 2010 since the Africans needing it then didn't have lots of cash to pay for it.
Also: it's experimental, which by definition means that someone has to invest a lot of time and money figuring out if it actually works. Drug companies license experimental therapies like this all the time. Nine times out of ten (probably more), they're buying something that turns out to be worthless. When they actually get hold of something that really works, o
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As a Canadian, I am curious why that original deal was inked and what dictated the cost structure. I'm going to guess $205,000 may not have even paid back development costs so it may have been a price intended to recoup a small portion of expenses or simply to make the product more openly available.
It's a travest that it is now going to be manufactured for $50M or so it seems without the benefit of understanding the technical complexity of manufacturing it. The facility would have to be secure physically an
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Businesses are not fond of buying licenses like that.
Perhaps it was in the Canadian government's interest to have a non-exclusive license, but let's face it, if Canada is having a bad enough emergency, they'll just pass a law suspending the exclusive agreement and get it done. No government is stupid enough to let itself truly be held hostage in an acute crisis by some pissant corporation.
What is more likely is that the small corp will be "convinced" to suspend or sub-license to to other corps who can make
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That usually makes the guy who sold you it for $205,000 look a little stupid.
A little? Make that VERY stupid -- unless the seller(s) got something out of it personally, which would make it illegal. NEVER license exclusively unless you make sure you have leveraged the upside potential.
Mixed feelings (Score:1)
On one hand, I'm glad there is such good progress at countering the latest high mortality disease.
On the other hand, I'm already seeing the kind of horrible drug advertisements that could come from this.*
*warning: Thinking about the horrible drug advertisements may result in depression, alcoholism, thoughts of suicide, thoughts of genocide, thoughts of regicide, high blood pressure, osteophytes, accelerated heart rate, decreased heart rate, heart tempo based on Beethoven's 7th Symphony, or spontaneous human
"Experimental Vaccine" (Score:1)
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You first.
It will probably be the military first. They're already being sent into Ebola-ravaged African countries for ... "support". And they always get the experimental drugs tried on them before the general public.
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Evil Harper Government (Score:2)
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Re:Evil Harper Government - really? Wow. (Score:2)
What was the logic of that sale?
Was it simply to raise government revenues by any means they could and someone said 'this vaccine that is unproven and not (at the time in 2010) required or in demand is worth $200K if we sell an exclusive license"? Even that could be defensible as the government has some responsibility to help provide non-taxation revenues where it can.
Or was the notion to make it available for potential production for a modest fee? That may have factored into the thinking. For this point, a
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The irony to me is that when you start citing things the Harper government has done in the last ten years, its very hard for detractors to be against them. It seems they're all against theoretical things that could happen or might happen but haven't.
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Because giving Canadian things away to the Americans is more important to Harper.
Newlink's license invalid? (Score:2)
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How would it seem so, since the very article that you link says "BioProtection Systems Corporation (BPS), now a wholly owned subsidiary of NewLink Genetics Inc., has performed at or above expectations thus far." Outside critics don't get to retroactively cancel a contract signed five years ago because progress under the contract doesn't meet their post-hoc expectations.
Recognize the crisis in US Big Pharma... (Score:2)
Come on - doesn't this emphasize the crisis in US pharma that is so easily ignored? Canada creates a highly viable experimental vaccine for a very dangerous and scary virus, and US pharmaceuticals seek to pwn it up in their own market. The rest of the world wont be fucked by the Canadian government - they'll make it readily available...because the rest of the world doesn't suffer from getting fucked on pricing by the US pharma lobby and policies around it.
When I arrived in China, I was shocked at how cheap
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Free market indeed, it's funny when the market is far freer in a politically communist nation
China has a huge number of trade barriers, including price caps on pharmaceuticals. The other half of the "free(er) market" you're describing is a failure to enforce IP rights (or, possibly, failure by companies to file the relevant patent applications in China, but that seems unlikely), so that pharma companies are having to compete with generic products that would be illegal in the US. You can applaud this if yo
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Free market indeed, it's funny when the market is far freer in a politically communist nation
China has a huge number of trade barriers, including price caps on pharmaceuticals. The other half of the "free(er) market" you're describing is a failure to enforce IP rights (or, possibly, failure by companies to file the relevant patent applications in China, but that seems unlikely), so that pharma companies are having to compete with generic products that would be illegal in the US. You can applaud this if you like, but it's not generally considered a good environment for inventing new drugs.
That's the point people generally make -- but look at the context of the article you're commenting about -- the drug in this case was invented in Canada, paid for by Canadian taxpayers, and then rights were sold pretty much at-cost to a US company to test and develop it -- and they didn't. Now they've given it a 25x markup and sold those rights off to Merck (which is against the original contract).
So... which is a better environment for inventing new drugs? The one in which there's an even playing field w
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That's the point people generally make -- but look at the context of the article you're commenting about -- the drug in this case was invented in Canada, paid for by Canadian taxpayers, and then rights were sold pretty much at-cost to a US company to test and develop it
Setting aside the breach of contract angle, keep in mind that the cost to test and develop a drug is actually the vast majority of the total cost to bring it to market.
It is a bit like saying that I sold my conceptual art drawing of a flying car to Ford for $100k and they went on and made millions on an actual flying car. The art drawing might have gone into the design, but there is a lot more to a flying car than a painting. Even an untested design isn't worth a whole lot, because the company buying it m
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Indeed -- the main cost is actually in all the testing, not in the conceptual (or actual) development -- this is where I started with my comment.
In this case however, there was no testing done that I can see; instead of putting the money into testing it, they sat on it until they could sell it to Merck -- who bought it for significantly more than it would have cost to test.
They weren't handed the equivalent of a concept drawing -- it was more like they were handed a concept car plus the facility to fabricat
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I wasn't really trying to debate that part of your post. I don't know what their original agreement was, but if they promised to develop it then they may very well have failed to uphold the agreement.
I think part of the issue here is that Ebola was a dead-end financially until recently. It is still speculative that anybody will make money off of it. So, companies weren't exactly beating down the door to develop it. Really the solution in these kinds of cases is for the government to just hire a company
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Only problem is, with the new international trade laws going in that let companies sue governments for "unfair competition", any government that goes cost-plus will get sued to the point where it's not worth pursuing anymore -- because there's no way the patent system can compete with low-cost drugs and open access methods. But I agree: that's what should have been happening for the past decade. It really calls into question why it hasn't, and why governments are instead pushing the current trade laws.
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Only problem is, with the new international trade laws going in that let companies sue governments for "unfair competition", any government that goes cost-plus will get sued to the point where it's not worth pursuing anymore -- because there's no way the patent system can compete with low-cost drugs and open access methods. But I agree: that's what should have been happening for the past decade. It really calls into question why it hasn't, and why governments are instead pushing the current trade laws.
Don't disagree, though really with the low success rate of new drugs these days, you'd think that pharma companies would look at this as an opportunity to diversify. Right now they employ hordes of scientists and since invention is serendipitous they often end up spending money developing less-promising drugs just to keep half of their scientists busy. They can't just fire everybody when they only have one or two candidates and then scale back up when they have more - it is hard to change scale and there
Authentic? (Score:2)
(authentic ones, not fake ones, of course)
Yea, just like all those authentic copies of Windows XP you could buy on street corners. Just because the box looks the same as the one in the US doesn't mean it's the same.
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*sigh* Yes, because that's the same thing.
It's rather easy to identify fake anything, for the most part, in China.. unless you're some street-dumb newb who just walks off a plane and is SHOCKED that they copy software for sale on street corners.
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Canada creates a highly viable experimental vaccine for a very dangerous and scary virus, and US pharmaceuticals seek to pwn it up in their own market.
The distinction is that Canada did NOT create an FDA-approved vaccine. The difference between a vaccine and an FDA-approved vaccine is that you have to start with about 15 of the former and spend $100M on each to end up with just one of the latter, typically.
Commercial pharma companies sell each other early discovery compounds on the cheap all the time, so it isn't really a scandal when governments sell them. Early drug candidates don't cost much because it turns out that 95% of them don't work.
Imagine th
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Yeah let's shut all of those big evil pharma companies down. That'll show them! Nevermind those few pesky billions of people who will die without them.