[QUOTe=Der Trihs]
By preference, pharmaceutical companies will … often research new drugs for no other purpose than to patent them and not use them - to in fact forbid anyone from using them until the patent runs out**.
[/quote]
I’m not even going to bother pretending - you cannot produce a cite for this, and you never will produce a cite for this.
YOur search skills don’t fail you - this never really happened.
Regards,
Shodan
The emphasis on Evil Big Pharma overlooks the many smaller firms that have developed or are working on cancer treatments and drugs for other diseases (ZMapp anyone?). These companies sometimes partner with or eventually are bought out by larger outfits, so they can have considerable $$ support or motivation to come up with a breakthrough treatment.
The fact remains that curing cancer (in its many different forms) is hard, much more difficult than the conspiracy theorists imagine.
I’d like to emphasize it again, since I’ve raised this issue with numerous alties/conspiracy theorists over the years, and no one has ever come up with a satisfactory answer as to why these many thousands of people are all busily engaged in covering up cures, when their lives (and those of their loved ones) are at stake.
there’s a fun article up on Respectful Insolence today about a cheap Ebola cure that They Don’t Want You To Know About. If you feel peckish and suspect a case of Ebola is coming on, just drink your own urine, and voila, cure.
*urine drinking is a bit detrimental to developing close interpersonal relationships, but hey, every treatment has side effects.
Your experience is wrong then. Go to clinicaltrials.gov. Every single clinical trial from phase I on up to phase III is in there; it currently lists about 176,000 clinical trials. Phase I studies are, by definition, years away from hitting the market, and are completely public. Not to mention that I’d be hard pressed to even find a Phase I drug that didn’t have preclinical research published, which would be years before that.
There is simply no way to be secretive even if you wanted to, which you wouldn’t for various reasons.
What does retooling a drugs factory even mean? For any new drug developed by a company they’re going to need to create a new manufacturing process. Following this logic no new drug, whether palliative or a cure, would ever get developed as factories would need to be “retooled”, which is clearly not the case. Besides, we’re talking about a process that costs the best part of a billion GBP for each new drug developed. Any costs of “retooling” a factory are completely insignificant when it comes to drug development.
Again, outright false. My wife is a pharmacologist for a drugs company who carries out basic research looking for a cure for schizophrenia. Any new drug that is developed from her work is 20 years in the future, at least. Drug companies also have extremely close ties to academia—to the point of funding studies and PhD/postdoc positions—in order to carry out basic research which is then freely published.
My company currently makes 0% of that $1 million per year. We invent a drug that is one pill that absolutely cures cancer and it will cost a fraction of that. Let’s say a small fraction. 1%. $10000 per pill. Seems like a very fair number to cure cancer. We now make $10000 per current cancer patient, and $10000 per newly diagnosed cancer patient. We didn’t lose any money at all as we previously had no drug on the market, and we now make a ton of money.
This oversimplifies both the biology (there is never going to be one pill to cure all cancer) and the economics (it will cost about 1 billion to get this pill through phase III studies and into FDA approval, which will affect the cost of the pill. Probably more than 1 billion considering we would have to run multiple phase IIIs across multiple cancers).
Yeah, this makes it even dumber, especially when you consider that in medicine, a cure that hasn’t been proven to work via clinical trials should never be assumed to work!
That’s just all the legal research. Endorphan-research is currently illegal for obvious reasons. Not Carlson’s company must be betting on having a head start once the current “orphans are people too”-fad ends and the research becomes legal again.
For example, if medication could cure this ^, I’d think Big Pharma would jump at the chance.
If my banner ads are to be believed, it’s only a matter of time before a housewife finds a simple cure for cancer (making doctors furious in the process).
This is why if big pharma ever did find a cure, using their so-called “science”, they’d have to publish ASAP.
Take a look at this (long) timeline:
Historic Dates and Events Related to Vaccines and Immunization
Up until about the 1950s, developments were credited to individuals, but as the timeline goes on, Pharma companies are named for when licenses were grated for major vaccines. It is assumed that these companies bore the burden of the development phase (altho not always the case), and there are perhaps hundreds of nameless scientists and lab rats involved. It’s clear that these companies ARE developing preventative “cures” (if only access issues and willful ignorance about them would not keep getting in the way).
Thanks for bringing this to my attention. As a cancer researcher, I’ve been working my buns off exploring the molecular nature of cancer in hope of finding a cure. Somehow no-one informed me that my actual job description was to to sit on my backside and accept hush money from big pharma. Obviously this was an oversight on their part. Can you please send me the contact information of whomever is in charge of the scientific suppression department so they can be sure put my name on the list?
So many diseases have been cured (or mostly cured) in the last hundred years it’s difficult to keep count. New treatments and vaccines are coming out so fast these days I can’t keep track. They’ve got new shots for colds, shingles, Hep and God knows what else that didn’t exist when I was a kid. Somebody’s doing some research.
Big Pharm probably doesn’t have much interest in finding the one cure that will fix all the worlds problems, so they don’t do research that way. If only the conspiracy theorists would get together and reveal that ultra-cure, we could all live forever.
What? Appreciating a bad pun is considered a medical issue now? Or is this a counter woosh?
This is the part of the argument that kills me. They believe that a scientist’s only motivation would be money.
Sure, they are motivated by money. Everybody likes money. But they also have altruistic motives. They want to relieve pain and suffering. They also have another motivation: Prestige. The scientist, or team of scientists, that cures cancer will be the biggest names in medicine. Perhaps science overall. There would be awards, there would be statues, there would be new college wings, Time magazine cover, every news show in existence, nerds getting LAID …prestige galore! They would be legends.
And they would sacrifice that for a steady paycheck? I don’t think so. Even if Big Pharma wanted to suppress it (which I do not accept), the people who make the discovery will shout it from the rooftops.
[sub]kidding about the getting laid part[/sub]
Also, did you know that in real life, pharmaceutical companies are not the only source of medical research?
Even in the United States we have government funded medical research. Did you know that in Spain and Italy and Britain and Germany and France and Japan and Australia and Canada and Belgium and so on they have public provision of health insurance? Did you know they have scientists and doctors in Germany and Japan and Britain?
If evil american pharma companies discovered the cure for cancer decades ago, and kept it secret, why is it that Japanese doctors and scientists haven’t been able to duplicate their work?
The other thing is, suppose you have a promising cure for cancer. It’s a simple pill, you take it once, and boom, no more cancer, and the pill is cheap and easy to make.
How do you know this pill cures cancer? You have to actually test it. In the real world lots of people get cancer, some of them get better and some get worse. How do you know what works against cancer and what doesn’t? You have to test it on lots of people. Every day there are news stories about promising treatments for cancer, and only a small fraction of those end up actually being useful. This is because they have unacceptable side effects, or don’t actually work better than existing treatments when you compare a thousand people who got the new treatment to a thousand people who got the standard treatment.
I’ve just realized the truth about who’s holding back cures for cancer and other killer diseases - it’s alternative medicine.
All those hundreds (thousands!) of different cures that alt med practitioners promote - none of them work. So obviously, they’re holding back the real alt cures, in a conspiracy with the multi-billion dollar supplement industry to keep us buying their ineffective products and services.
It’s evil, I tell you. 
:smack::eek::mad:
I appreciate the solid information you provided, but you might want to review the several posts leading up to the one to which you responded to see why there is so much snickering in the peanut gallery. Hint: endorphan was not a typo.
Whoosh.
Exactly. In science-based medicine, one of the major mantras is “if you can’t show that it works in clinical trials, we don’t know that it works”. Or, more to the point: the way we know in the first place if a treatment is valid is if the peer-revewed clinical trials on the subject demonstrate that it is valid. Almost by definition, we wouldn’t know if something actually did cure cancer until there were clinical trials of it. And clinical trials have to be registered.
This whole conspiracy theory is hella stupid.
Setting aside my orphan-killing obligations for a moment, I should point out that **Danja **is actually right about the secrecy inherent in the pharmaceutical industry.
As with any industry that deals with innovative developments, it’s extremely important to keep information on potential new products confidential in the early stages. We are constantly warned about not letting information leak out through unofficial channels.
Of course the industry is subject to strict government oversight, and we can’t hide things from the regulatory agencies, but we try to keep information away from our rivals. Nevertheless, industry spies and information theft are a real problem that we are frequently reminded of.
But just in case anyone out there is worried that maybe mega-pharma isn’t the vile bogeyman often depicted in movies,
let me reassure you that we do, in fact, kill puppy dogs and bunny rabbits. For reals!
(Seriously, I’m glad I don’t work in the lab.)