AIBU to think it isn't a big conspiracy

[fifi669]

I'm seeing endless updates on fb and random articles on the net about pharmaceutical companies and other powers that be withholding cures for things such as cancer for money.

The idea they're plugging is that they make money through drugs to relieve symptoms so don't want to release a cure as it'd be less profitable. Another one says they withhold vaccines as healthy people won't need their drugs so don't make them available.

AIBU to think this is all tosh? I've included a pic of the sort of thing I'm talking about.

There will always be illnesses that need cures, if a cure is found then scientist will be on the hunt for a cure to let say strokes.

I think their will be a cure for all but the most advanced cancers in the next.... Erm 20 years or so? So much money, so many people researching and testing, so many people wanting a cure.... Maybe I'm just optimistic!

Its not inconceivable...

Hypothetically.. Let's say a drug company spend £10million developing a drug for a particular illness...they make £2million on it and suddenly they discover a better drug for said illness...they would still need to recoup money for the first drug....

But formerbabe if they don't exploit the wonder cure drug then they've lost the ££ they spent developing that.
They may as well start selling the new cure drug & making ££ on that than on the old drug.

But Formerbabe the second drug would take years to come through all the phases of testing. By the time it had approval, the first drug would likely be coming off patent anyway. Also most cancer therapies are used in combination to maximise their effects. There's no one size fits all.

I work with pharma companies as an outside agency. The people who I work with work outrageous hours under stress levels that I know I just couldn't hack. The majority of them are former doctors/medically trained.

The money that goes into developing a drug and getting it to market is unbelievable. The number of failed drugs that never get developed is also huge.

YANBU, one of the most heartbreaking things I've seen was a TV programme about a man who said he could 'cure' brain tumours with homeopathic medicine and hypnotism and all kinds of woo.

One young woman turned down the conventional treatment and surgery that could have saved her in order to get 'treated' by this man, sadly she died and so did his other patients in the end.

This man was very rich.

At the end of the day, "cancer" is just an umbrella term for a type of disease process - I don't think it's any more likely that we'll "cure cancer" than "cure infection" or "cure autoimmunity". Unfortunately, even if we did, cancers can evolve, in the same way that bacteria and viruses can - so we could hit problems similar to antibiotic resistance with anti-cancer drugs.

What definitely is an evolving ethical concern is that as anti-cancer drugs become more and more specialised, there are potentially fewer and fewer opportunities for companies to recoup outlays (e.g. Herceptin specifically acts at a target found only in a minority of breast cancers). This is part of the reason newer drugs are so much more expensive. The other worry is that there may well be targets in some cancers that are slightly different forms depending on, for example, ethnicity. There is a debate as to whether drug companies should be refused a license for a drug aimed at a potentially lucrative market unless they also develop the equivalent for a potentially less affluent market.

YANBU there is no 'cure'.

Parallax it's not really an ethical issue. Herceptin works on a small number of breast cancers because of the biology of the cancer and what's on the cancer cells. People are working on targeting other targets for other breast cancers. It's not possible to make a single therapy for all, because the markers and targets are different. Limiting the use of therapies because they're not affordable by everyone is kind of narrow minded as it would block the use of treatments that work for people who can, and nobody is delibrately making therapies that are expensive, it's just that medical care is often expensive especially with new treatments.

Personalised medicine with treatments adapted to peoples' genetics, the genetics of their cancer etc., really is the future. It's not going to be cheap to start, but it will be effective. It's already being done in preclinical research.

Those 'cures' people may think they have found by searching the internet that they assume are being covered up because they're not being used are likely (a) ideas that worked in labs but failed at some stage of the clinical trial process (b) ideas that worked in labs that are still in or moving towards clinical trial or (c) ideas that people have suggested that haven't even been researched. Takes a looong time to move from looking like it works in a lab to being routinely used on patients.

I think you've missed my point. Yes, Hercepfin is specific for HER-2.

What IS an ethical issue is how drug companies choose which targets to focus on. Should this be based on how common a cancer is? Or how bad the prognosis is with existing treatment? Or how much profit you think you can make out of it? My point is that there are on-going debates about whether drug companies should have a free choice of target (in which case profit is likely to be a factor, if not the only one) or whether licensing etc should be used to persuade them to focus on other targets that may not appear as commercially attractive.

(I guess what I'm trying - probably not very well - to say is that there is already a significant discrepancy in the money invested in drug development for conditions that affect rich people as opposed to those that affect (mainly) poorer people - on a global level certainly. As cancer therapy becomes more personalised (and I completely agree with you that this is the future, and by necessity expensive), people with rarer forms of cancer, or more limited capacity to pay for treatment may be less favourable investment priorities for drug companies. Because there is less of a market to recoup their costs. Some people think this risk should be avoided by regulation.)

By the time its got to the licensing stage it's too late to debate it. Companies will want something that works. If there's an issue in the 'wrong' targets being focused on, it's a problem at the level of the research agencie's choices of which research to fund in the research and development stage of finding and testing targets, not what companies will get licensing deals for.

I know a pharmacist who is a millionaire, but, despite being in general practice, he's also a very astute businessman.