Posted on 08/02/2014 2:04:14 AM PDT by nickcarraway
SNIP
And while Ebola is lethal, it's rare. Outbreaks are unpredictable, giving doctors few chances to test new treatments. While the current epidemic is the largest recorded, the number of people sickened by Ebola is small compared to the number killed by other diseases like malaria or dengue. Much of the funding for Ebola research is from governments that worry about the virus being used in a bioterror attack.
"It's not economically viable for any company to do this kind of research because they have stockholders to think about," said Ben Neuman, a virologist at the University of Reading in Britain.
There are about a half dozen Ebola drugs and vaccines in development, several of which have received funding from the U.S. One drug developed by the U.S. Army has shown promising results when tested in monkeys.
SNIP
(Excerpt) Read more at cbs8.com ...
Big Pharma will research what O’care tells them to, or no grants.
People seem to forget the incestuous relationship of Big Pharma, Congress and the FDA. And you can add in the doctors pushing the latest most expensive drug on the market as a Wonder drug. Only to have it FDA black boxed warning a few years down the road when people start having life threatening reactions. How many people have to die before the drugs are yanked from the market? How many people have to develop A Fib that did not have it before the drug is yanked? VICIOUS CIRCLE.
In the spirit of redemption, I would be ok with a program allowing those in prison with life sentences to volunteer as test subjects with the possibility of a commutation or pardon.
They would have to be made fully cognizant of the known risks and voluntarily choose to accept them, and the tests would have to be carefully monitored by an independent party to ensure they were not being conducted gratuitously or inhumanely. The subjects would have to be psychologically screened as well to make as certain as possible that their participation was in the spirit of atonement and willingness to sacrifice for the good of society and that their participation was not merely an extension of the risk driven aspects of their personality that got them into prison in the first place.
In short, if you have a prisoner who is facing a life sentence, who has shown genuine remorse and is willing to place his/her life on the line in the spirit of serving their fellow man, and some guarantor that the tests will be administered in a responsible and ethical manner, then there should be a mechanism in place to permit the clinical trials with the possibility of a commutation or pardon at the end of it (given that they survive).
like wwe did for HIV? One of the most political hot potato diseases with everyone looking for a vaccine or cure? Its taken 30 years to get viable treatment. We cant solve everything instantly with a wave of the wand
And TB which we thought we had beaten is now back with drug resistant strains that defy treatment. We have been working on that one over 100 years. Sometimes the bugs win.....
The natural course of life is to be dead by 40. For most people if you want to live longer that requires medical intervention. Yes drugs have side effects, but the benefits more than outweigh the side effects, unless you are a lawyer. we all die of something, if you choose to do it naturally at 30 or 40 God bless you, I would like to see my grandchildren grow up. I take my blood pressure meds.
Killing any Ebola virus would be racis’.
Why isn’t there a cure for “cancer”?
Before we get outraged about “why we don’t have personal jet packs yet”, it’s important to look at this from a different perspective.
1) Viruses are the most abundant form of life in the world, of which there are likely more “species” than there are species of animals and plants. Maybe even more than animals, plants and bacteria. In total numbers, there are wildly estimated to be 10^31 individual viruses in the world, which is more than stars in the known universe.
2) About half of known viruses are bacteriophage, which mean they prey on bacteria. And in the world viruses and all other forms of life have been engaged in natural selection since they first came about.
3) This being said, pick a pathogenic virus, just one kind, and ask “How soon can we develop a vaccine against it?”
Why isn’t there a cure for rampant liberalism other than a shot of .308?
And it’s on its way to Atlanta!
If it gets completely out of control with Africans dying by the thousands you can guarantee the black Africans will blame the white man and every white will have a choice of flee Africa or be killed.
I don’t believe that the current FDA rules and regulations are oriented towards consumer safety so much as they are the result of lobbying by labs and producers to get their product approved. (Lobbying=money to politicians.)
Post to me or FReep mail to be on/off the Bring Out Your Dead ping list.
The purpose of the “Bring Out Your Dead” ping list (formerly the “Ebola” ping list) is very early warning of emerging pandemics, as such it has a high false positive rate.
So far the false positive rate is 100%.
At some point we may well have a high mortality pandemic, and likely as not the “Bring Out Your Dead” threads will miss the beginning entirely.
*sigh* Such is life, and death...
Because it's caused by a virus, just like everything else we can't cure.
What amazed me when I started working there was the actual costs involved in getting a drug from an idea in the lab to extensive lab testing to animal testing and the costs of even getting to preliminary clinical trials. Not to mention the cost of specialized lab equipment, clean rooms, etc. and the number of people involved and their wages. I used to manage weekly accounts payable check runs and it was not unusual for them to be over a million dollars sometimes with me cutting checks or performing wire transfers for $500k or more at a time to companies, some overseas in the UK and Netherlands who were performing primate and “beagle”, i.e. dog animal trials for us (evidently it was more cost effective and less restrictive than using US firms and yes, I winced at the thought of the animal trials but fully understood the necessity of it) and the human trials were also extremely expensive and were outsourced to independent companies in order to keep them “objective” and at "arms lenth" and also with another separate firm performing the independent analysis and tracking, all as IIRC, was required by the FDA.
And our semi-monthly payroll was well over a million dollars per pay and we were a rather small company – only about 300 people meaning the average salary was about 100k per year (although while I was making a very good salary, I was nowhere near that : ), ).
We had only a small animal lab with only mice and rats and even then, because of the animal rights activists, the eco-animal “rights” terrorists who had made threats, we had very tight security and armed guards at all the main entrances.
I remember one day processing an invoice for something called a “small mouse head impactor” and I asked one of the chief scientists who I’d become friendly with, just what is a “small mouse head impactor” and he told me it was basically a device that would neatly and effectively crack open the skull of a small mouse without damaging the underlying structures and brain. “Cool” I said and he offered to let me come into the animal lab with him one day to watch how it worked. Unfortunately I never had the opportunity to do that. : (
Most people and evidently many here, have no idea what the upfront costs are in developing a new drug or vaccine and the fact that many never get out of the lab or those that get out of the lab testing, out of animal testing, live alone making it to human clinical trials, often they end up not getting FDA approval and the whole process starts all over again without those costs ever being recouped.
And FWIW, the pharma I worked for was bleeding cash and one of the few things keeping us afloat, aside from the brain tumor wafer sales which did not cover our operating costs, was the contract work we were doing for the NIH and even with that we had a 20% reduction of force, i.e. a big layoff. A few years after I left, after one failed merger and another hostile takeover attempt, they were bought out by another bigger pharma and that happened because they just plain ran out of money to continue to operate.
The so called “big (evil) pharmas” make money because they are so large and diverse and have many profitable drugs and products in general use. With that, they can reinvest in new research in sometimes in novel drugs with limited market sale potential but even then there are limits in what these companies, with their shareholders and employees, are willing to invest in a product that will lose them money.
This is why the few drug candidates that have been developed were developed with government funding.
R&D costs money and a whole lot of it and very few researchers, biologists, biochemical scientists and even non-scientist, us lowly payroll/accounts payable mangers are willing to work for nothing or volunteer their time to develop a drug with limited use and no profit potential, so someone has to pay for it. This is one area where I think government funding is a worthwhile endeavor.
I think such experiments were conducted in the past. But in the current ethical climate, I doubt any such research proposal would get past an IRB (institutional [ethical] review board). In fact, the rules for using prisoners in research are far more stringent than those for using other volunteers.
Interestingly, my supervisor said much the same as you yesterday, when I explained why there is so much difficulty in getting drugs for rare diseases (like Ebola) approved.
And yet there are compounds that have shown effectivness POST exposure to ebola.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24583123
That particular compound is already in phase III clinical trials as an anti-influenza drug.
My perspective comes from reading countless articles on drug development, so I know a lot about it but I don't have that insider's appreciation of the subject. I chose a different career pathway because I did *not* want to work for pharmaceutical companies (sorry, it just isn't my thing).
R&D costs money and a whole lot of it and very few researchers, biologists, biochemical scientists and even non-scientist, us lowly payroll/accounts payable mangers are willing to work for nothing or volunteer their time to develop a drug with limited use and no profit potential, so someone has to pay for it. This is one area where I think government funding is a worthwhile endeavor.
Indeed. I find it a bit worrisome that even on this nominatively conservative website, so many people condemn the pharmaceutical companies for making "huge" profits. They see only the gross company incomes and high prices of new drugs, but have no idea of the costs of developing and testing those drugs, or that for every drug that makes it through clinical trials, dozens of others had to be abandoned with no return on the investment into their development. It costs to train the PhD scientists to develop the drugs, and there are not that many people with the intellectual ability to be educated to that level. Plus, graduate school... ugh... no one would go through all that and then volunteer to work pro bono. Besides, all of those highly trained scientists have to live, eat, and wear clothes, none of which comes free. In any case, what's wrong with wanting to profit from one's work?
I remember one day processing an invoice for something called a “small mouse head impactor” ... it was basically a device that would neatly and effectively crack open the skull of a small mouse without damaging the underlying structures and brain.
Sounds handy. I remember opening mouse heads with forceps for one experiment... it was rather messy. I prefer not to do animal work, though.
Yep, that one is further along than most, but for a different disease. Most of the other drugs have not been efficacy tested in humans at all, for any indication.
It is so terrible, that patients can only receive supportive care. It does seem to help, since the death rate from this outbreak is “only” about 60%, which is significantly lower than that seen in other outbreaks—up to 90%.
Yep, that one is further along than most, but for a different disease. Most of the other drugs have not been efficacy tested in humans at all, for any indication.
It is so terrible, that patients can only receive supportive care. It does seem to help, since the death rate from this outbreak is “only” about 60%, which is significantly lower than that seen in other outbreaks—up to 90%.
Why is there air?
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