Yeah it's not really researchers that I'm worried about, it's their bosses.
Pharma mostly avoids low-profit avenues, but at least partly because that would be a good way to go out of business. However, to suggest that they intentionally suppress researchers with the goal of reducing costs seems a bit far-fetched.
many pharma do invest some of their portfolio into things that are unlikely to have short-term or any payoff, and many of them also maintain compassionate programs to get expensive drugs to people who wouldn't be able to otherwise afford them. They do this because they are highly profitable, which unfortunately is as much explained by their marketing acumen as much as it is by solid research and development.
Mine was not a conspiracy-innuendo, but rather a simple critique of profit-driven research in health-related sciences. Humans can do wonderful things when they work together, so it's rather sad that we seem to do that only when there are riches on the line.
But as a private company they need profit to fund the science. They'd go out of business if they weren't making a profit.
It's largely the role of government to fund public goods (e.g. by providing grants to university researchers). We can't expect the scientists and engineers to work for free.
1. make drugs without a profit margin available to consumers and researchers
2. go out of business.
It seems like there's plenty of grey area in there.
Yes, as a private company. In my opinion, it's not like everything has to be a private profit-driven company, precisely because incentives are not necessarily aligned to the public good.
This is such a ridiculous argument, IMO. As a thought experiment consider something like cancer treatment. If some pharma company researcher found a way to 100% prevent or reverse cancer, why would the company hide that? In the best case, they could make a ton of money from it by selling it cheap to everyone. In the worse case, they could make a ton of money selling it to the ultra wealthy with an obscene price tag. If they tried to hide it, the researcher would share the information elsewhere, no?
Novel drug research is extremely expensive and time consuming, logically speaking a for-profit pharma company will assign its resources to the research which is most likely to make a profit.
As a result rare conditions will not attract the research necessary to create drugs to treat them. To give you a concrete example, AFAIK there was never a vaccine for MERS which is a coronovirus which preceded COVID-19.
And that's separate from the Office of Orphan Products Development: https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/office-clinical-policy-and-pro...
It's not a recent thing, too. Different programs have been enacted in the US going as far back as the Orphan Drug Act of 1983. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_Drug_Act_of_1983
Broader reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_drug
I'm not saying the pharma companies pursue all possible opportunities to research/create new drugs, just that it's ridiculous to think if they did find one, they would suppress that information. It seems conspiratorial.
The Orphan drug act or incubators you link don't contradict the point I'm trying to make, but maybe that's on me.
> Can you provide an example of a treatment people would like that 'big pharma' wouldn't produce because they couldn't make a profit on it?
That's very different from:
> You're saying hiding the discovery of novel, profitable, drugs because profits from the existing treatment is widespread?
?
You are the head of strategy presenting to Big Pharma CEO.
You say 'Here are 5 new drugs which have potential for great impact, each will cost a billion. 4 of them are vaccines, which will be very inexpensive, and nobody will buy and we will lose money. One of them is a fairly expensive cancer treatment. Which one do you want to focus on boss?'
Supply/Demand and just Basic Economics generally work their way into the system.
Some drugs are much more profitable than others, many of them are not going to be profitable, and there's less incentive to work on them. Vaccines in particular.
It's a big part of the equation we have to deal with.
I like to write and publish books, but only because I know that several thousand people are going to buy them (yeah, humblebrag...). I wouldn't bother with them if my audience was two orders of magnitude smaller. It is just not worth the hassle.
Similarly, most programmers here probably work on projects used by thousands at least as well. Few people will put hours and energy into something that will only be used by, say, three users.
Rare diseases suffer from the same problem. The cost of development of drugs under current regulatory regime is high and in case of rare disease, cannot be amortized later over a huge set of patients. Moreover, most promising drugs actually fail in human trials, but the costs are already incurred.
Writing a book for yourself may have some sort of forcing function to understand a topic. But mostly I wouldn’t write a whole book to do that.
1) use of Psylocibin (mushrooms) assisted Congitive Behavioural Therapy for curing PTSD, depression, anxiety, etc. we have seen extremely good results from this and pharma companies could have likely pushed it much much sooner
2) Biofeedback/Neurofeedback has been around for more than a decade and is under-researched, under-insured, and under-prescribed for treatment of a lot of mental issues from anxiety to post-concussive syndrome to ADHD.
both of these can negate the need for a years or decades long reliance on SSRIs or stimulants.