Posted on 01/01/2007 9:41:39 PM PST by seacapn
Two UK-based academics have devised a way to invent new medicines and get them to market at a fraction of the cost charged by big drug companies, enabling millions in poor countries to be cured of infectious diseases and potentially slashing the NHS drugs bill.
Sunil Shaunak, professor of infectious diseases at Imperial College, based at Hammersmith hospital, calls their revolutionary new model "ethical pharmaceuticals".
Improvements they devise to the molecular structure of an existing, expensive drug turn it technically into a new medicine which is no longer under a 20-year patent to a multinational drug company and can be made and sold cheaply.
The process has the potential to undermine the monopoly of the big drug companies and bring cheaper drugs not only to poor countries but back to the UK.
Professor Shaunak and his colleague from the London School of Pharmacy, Steve Brocchini, have linked up with an Indian biotech company which will manufacture the first drug - for hepatitis C - if clinical trials in India, sponsored by the Indian government, are successful. Hepatitis C affects 170 million people worldwide and at least 200,000 in the UK.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
If this approach to drugmaking works out, will the resulting drugs be legal in the US? If not, how wide will the price differential grow between drugs purchased in the US, and drugs purchased in other countries? What happens to "innovation and development?"
More details on the specific Hep-C drug mentioned in the article are available in this more detailed article.
This will be an interesting topic to track in the next few years...
The pharmaceutical equivalent of Napster (before it went straight!).
You can bet the FDA will not approve them. On another note, the pharmaceuticals could stop providing their drugs to them. Who will suffer the most for that?
Their own title for them ... "Ethical pharmaceuticals"
is just as funny, since their stated business plan is to steal someone else's work product and change it just enough to convince a court that it's something different.
"The process has the potential to undermine the monopoly of the big drug companies and bring cheaper drugs not only to poor countries .."
The most likely outcome of the efforts the Guardian is championing will be a decrease in R&D expenditures by drug companies. If the methods to rip off their inventions, thereby negating their billions in dollars of research expenditures, then why should these companies spend the money to develop new drugs? Why not just make a better floor cleaner? Efforts like this are simply felonious assault hidden by liberals but with huge negative payoffs.
Want your grandchildren to die because no company wants to spend the money to invent drugs to battle "new disease 9.0?" Continue to support efforts such as the Guardian likes.
Even *IF* this is successful in it's first few applications, the law of diminishing returns for the "ethical pharmacologists" (projecting insecurities much?) will quickly kick in. The existing pharma companies will run their drugs through similar number crunching programs and patent the related compounds the same day they apply for the patent for the main test candidate compound.
Once the initial effects are felt, all this will do is bolster the position of the largest conglomerates by raising the price of entry into the pharma R&D field.
Honestly, if private pharma companies cut way back on development, I'd expect a political push for the government to take over that function. Perhaps the FDA or HHS would be expanded. Perhaps we'd have a new "Department of Medical Advancement" foisted into the cabinet.
Wait till you see how hard to get they are when they're 'free'.
L
Maybe THAT is the 'interesting' part.
Yes they will but they will have to go through the same testing as the original innovator of the drug as it is a new molecular structure but works the same way in the body.
The major drug companies do that today but will market their "new drug" as a competitor to the old drug and will not give you a generic price. The only way this plan will work is if the companies do not do all the required trials and ship it direct to the third world countries without the clinical trials. This may seem safe. It is not safe. Sometimes a slight molecular twist will give a drug a new property that is dangerous. Some years back a new antiviral made it to clinical trials in humans. The drug was acutely hepatotoxic and resulted in total liver failure and death for several of the people in the trials.
Yes they will but they will have to go through the same testing as the original innovator of the drug as it is a new molecular structure but works the same way in the body.
The major drug companies do that today but will market their "new drug" as a competitor to the old drug and will not give you a generic price. The only way this plan will work is if the companies do not do all the required trials and ship it direct to the third world countries without the clinical trials. This may seem safe. It is not safe. Sometimes a slight molecular twist will give a drug a new property that is dangerous. Some years back a new antiviral made it to clinical trials in humans. The drug was acutely hepatotoxic and resulted in total liver failure and death for several of the people in the trials.
Scientists find way to slash cost of drugs
Did they manage to take insurance companies and lawyers out of the equation?
Want cheaper drugs? Two words: Tort Reform
We'll never see it.
Hard as in "you ain't seen nothin' yet." Anybody that thinks this is a good idea has a borderline streak of criminality in them as well, as they are basically itching to buy stolen goods.
There is a sad irony in the fact that the "innovators" and "scientists" touting this dangerous idea can, wihout even so much as a snigger, call their untested drugs "ethical pharmaceuticals".
Im all for reducing the cost of drugs, but there is one reality that must be dealt with.
The cost of development must be paid for. If the drug companys cannot fund the research, they won't perform the research (and forward progress will stop by necessity)
Drugs are rarely expensive because of the ingredients. They are expensive because it takes decades of expensive scientist developing the drug, proving it works, proving its safe and dealing with the government red tape...all during which time it garners NO revenue.
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