Comment by Murfalo
14 hours ago
Let's play spot the conflict of interest. Three of seven authors tied to a company selling biological aging tests. One consults for Merck, GSK, etc.
There seems some promise at times but I also struggle to see the recent slew of "GLP-1s cure X", where X is seemingly any ailment known to man, as much more than the next Big Pharma gold rush where the profits dwarf any eventual regulatory fines, and taxpayers and real patients are left with the costs.
No matter what drugmakers spend money on, you hear complaints:
- Marketing, to learn what / whom / how to sell: “They spend more on TV ads than R&D!”
- Basic R&D: “Look at all the conflicts of interest in this academic research!”
- Commercial R&D: “They’re just looking for ways to extend the patent lifetime of drugs that only exist because of government-funded basic R&D!”
- Back to the shareholders (mostly pensions and retirement accounts): “Billions of stock buybacks for Wall Street!”
What should the pharmaceutical companies with billions coming in from GLP-1’s be spending their money on?
What’s the concern here? Too much justice? Holding powerful institutes to account frequently seems like a good thing to me.
The concern is the aversive mind that tries to find fault in everything which then leads to politicians creating policies which prevent or hinder medical discoveries and treatments.
This isn’t what justice is. It’s also not holding people (or orgs) to account. It’s complaints against an entity that people often don’t understand or like.
You may be right that they are in a bind wrt public opinion. But that is not a defence against any specific criticism. What is your opinion on the conflict of interest mentioned above?
How is it a conflict of interest for GLP-1 makers and the scientists who work with/for them to look for new medical value in an academic setting with willing collaborators and all the usual peer review?
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Both opinions can be true, drugmakers should still spend money on R&D, and consumers should hold academic research with significant financial ties to interested sponsors to a higher standard of scrutiny.
Criticism does not have to mean preventing work, we can be critical especially of work that we find important.
I'm inclined to agree with your point, but it seems like there's an obvious thing they could do that I think people wouldn't complain about: Reduce their prices. Of course that would just look like not getting so many billions from GLP-1 drugs, rather than like any specific action one could complain about.
(If anyone reading this feels inclined to say something like "But how would that benefit them?" -- well, if you restrict consideration to things they could do that benefit them, then it no longer seems so unreasonable if all their options look bad to the critically-minded. Maybe they should be doing things that benefit the rest of the world more and themselves less.)
Outside of the occasional spike from a real blockbuster, pharmaceutical companies are not particularly profitable. Without those temporary (patent-protected) “windfall” profits, the business model doesn’t work.
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One thing they are spending them on is tons of new research. Lilly is spinning up massive facilities in Indiana, of all places. I know some absolutely fantastic researchers at Indiana University but I had never thought of it as a biotech hub before.
Lilly is headquartered in Indiana so it isn’t some huge surprise..
Much like the conspiracy that pharma companies are uninterested in curing diseases, the complaints aren't based on data or facts.
I'll offer cystic fibrosis as an example. Trikafta may as well be a miracle drug. And CRISPR-based gene editing and replacements are being researched that could be an outright cure, as opposed to a 90% cure.
The problem is these treatments on the bleeding edge of biological understanding are going to start out expensive.
That puts most Western governments with limited budgets in a pickle, having promised their citizens modern medicine equitably at affordable cost, tax or otherwise.
I am EXTREMELY skeptical of epigenetic clocks at the moment, and have been for a few years, but at the same time it's important for these clocks to be investigated and shown to be what they are.
Even though I personally expect them to be readouts of things that don't affect healthspan much, I don't have any more evidence than those trying to work out what they are. I've been wrong before, and also most tech development does not end up living to its promises, but without the investigation we'll never know.
> Big Pharma gold rush where the profits dwarf any eventual regulatory fines
With pharma malfeasance, the penalties are actually big enough, unlike most other fields. Unless you have something particular in mind?
> I am EXTREMELY skeptical of epigenetic clocks
I hear that word and I immediately think of "that" guy that runs the cocktails of additive interventions to "improve" it.
Yes, I hear what you’re saying… Let me tell you about peptides!
Valid questions.
What would you propose instead? Who will do this research, with what funding, and why will they want to do it? And why would we trust that research more than this? Wouldn’t we scrutinize research carefully regardless of the source?
There are multiple alternative systems, as we see in other countries. But they all have tradeoffs and some really only make sense if some international entity is doing research somewhere else under a different set of rules.
No. This is what we have government for. The self-interested are the least qualified. They are simultaneously paying to market the drug (which involves exaggerating or lying about its capabilities and minimizing or hiding its drawbacks.)
This certainly seems like something a national health service (or even insurance company) should be doing in its own interest (in order to direct spending), and wouldn't have any intrinsic bias towards any particular outcome other than an accurate one. The problem is that you need a government that is not also owned by the drug company.
In the US we have an enormous amount of government health care spending that would benefit from more knowledge about the effects of these drugs. There's no reason why we should ever take the drug company's word for anything. The research was likely originally done in an academic setting, and likely largely government-funded. The only reason the drug companies get these drugs from that environment is through corruption.
> The Bayh-Dole Act made a key change in federal contracting procedures that allowed contractors the right to retain ownership of inventions made with federal funding.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act
Agree, in principle, but in the US we are very far from that system, so essentially unrealistic.
And the countries that do have such systems are doing so with US pharma companies cranking out drugs. Presumably if they were fully self-contained that system would be much slower but also generate a higher proportion of medically useful drugs, vs patent-preserving lobbying or other shenanigans.
I don't understand this fixation. If you literally had a cure for X for X in all ailments known to man, you would in fact have a Pharma gold rush.
it's low quality research. you don't need to point to perceived conflicts of interest. the drug is semaglutide, not a merck or gsk product. and semaglutide is coming of patent anyway
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