Comment by jeffwass
5 years ago
Anecdote - 20+ years ago my colleague told me how his wife worked in the pharma industry.
She was studying a potential product to 'cure' some disease or other. Apparently her initial tests on the company's product worked amazingly well, removing all trace of the disease with just a few doses.
She was excited to report this success to her boss, who replied "That's Horrible!". The company wasn't interested in a cure that requires only a few doses, but something that requires a longer-term rent-seeking subscription plan.
I work in this industry and this doesn't ring true.
It would never be the case that a single researcher does some tests and reports them to the boss except in the very earliest stages of drug development. The "boss" in this situation would be another research scientist, far removed from business strategy.
Even then, success in a petri-dish doesn't mean much - it would be years of research with a large team to determine if it was safe and efficacious in human trials.
The idea that the pharma industry suppresses viable medicines because they are "too good" is just conspiracy theory.
I'm not in the industry, but I've read a lot about how drugs get to market and this sounds valid. It takes a LOT of time and money for a drug company to get to the point of knowing how safe and effective a drug is in humans. That's pretty much the last step of drug manufacturing.
By the time a company has spent that amount of research effort and money, there's no way they'd just abandon a drug because it isn't rent seeking enough. Businesses want to recover whatever investment they can.
If a company is aware that a new drug could cure a previously managed disease, it’s pretty obvious that you’d like to be the one pocketing any available profits before a competitor does. The conspiracy only works to the extent that nobody else in the world could create the same drug, and that every person aware of its existence is prepared to keep it secret and lose out on the money to be made selling it.
6 replies →
Then we have the dental industry. Drill, fill, and bill, without much care for anything else. Not so much active suppression as it is neglecting anything that might disrupt the industry.
not to mention competition for ideas from gung ho biotech startups...
This seems implausible. It’s extremely difficult to find cures in the first place, and in the event a company does, the US is willing to pay a ton for them (see recent Hep C medications).
I would need more proof before being able to believe an executive team would throw away a sellable cure for an extremely low probability of finding a longer term rent seeking subscription plan.
I recently learned of some research that had a human trial that looked like it could potentially cure Multiple sclerosis (MS) and even potentially many (maybe all?) autoimmune diseases. However, it was too expensive, so no pharmaceutical companies picked it up. It was only when the researchers found a cheaper way of doing it that biopharmas were interested.
Source is in this video, link starts at 5:35, watch until 8:15ish. https://youtu.be/J8vdDy7SN9k?t=335
Not all diseases are bad enough to justify enormous pricetags for a cure.
I am not aware of any diseases where the US government would not pay for a cure if there is a known cure for it because the price to “how bad is the disease” ratio is too high.
4 replies →
This is certainly true, but it describes why companies don't start or continue the research. This has nothing to do with killing off a clinical stage drug because it was "too successful".
The latter, as reported by GP, doesn't seem very plausible.
This sounds like it went through a few rounds of telephone and lost some details. There are numerous details to this anecdote which are incompatible with the simple interpretation "pharma actively avoids cures"
Since we’re sharing anecdotes, a relative of mine is a retired oncologist and he’s pretty cynical towards big pharma as well. He’s witnessed patents on drugs for chemotherapy expire only for the company to introduce basically the same chemical compound with minimal changes as a new pharmaceutical, obtaining a fresh patent and of course the ability to set near arbitrary prices again. These “new” drugs could easily have worse side effects than the previous ones, too. Then they’d buy out the committees responsible for setting treatment guidelines so they’d recommend the new drugs, and to complete the puzzle, if doctors deviate from these guidelines they’re liable for potential damages. Note this is Europe and I’m not too clear on the details, but you get the gist of it.
The incentives of capitalism means that the ideal goal for pharmaceutical companies is Amazon Prime, but you need to subscribe to stay alive. We need to change the incentives because this is a bad outcome for society.
The ideal goal for everyone is getting paid (in increasing amounts) on a regular basis, regardless of “-ism”.
The purpose of patents is to allow for a period to earn an ROI and then release it to everyone. Alternative could be taxpayers paying for it and it going into the public domain immediately.
> The ideal goal for everyone is getting paid (in increasing amounts) on a regular basis, regardless of “-ism”.
no, that parenthesis, (in increasing amounts), is a feature of capitalism, not inherent to all human motivation. the need for ever increasing income stems from the need to provide capital investors with a return.
9 replies →