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Comment by blazespin | Hacker News Reader

The problem is not the high cost of drugs, the problem is the lack of R&D into processes and drugs that are not patentable. Like Stem Cells or Vitamin C. I'm not saying that these have any medical value, it's just no one is willing to invest because there is no ROI. What might be interesting is force everyone to buy life insurance and then have the life insurance industry underwrite the R&D.

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Not just lack of R&D. After expenses for FDA clinical trials is $150 million+. Nobody can afford that if they don't have a patent letting them recoup expenses.

My go to example for this is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helminthic_therapy. That is the treatment of autoimmune diseases by infecting people with parasites which suppress your immune system in a targeted way for their own protection. I personally know someone who successfully treated his Crohn's disease with hookworm for 5 years and counting now, and the main problem he has is that if he ever needs antibiotics he needs to get reinfected because antibiotics will kill the hookworm.

But it is illegal to receive this treatment in the US because the FDA has never approved it.

I really think medical trials is something that the world government should sponsor so that treatments are accessible to everyone. Maybe each country contributes some small percent of their GDP.

And that's a traditional game theory solution. If I pay less, I still get full access to new drugs.

Well that already happens. Lets make it more obvious who contributes what.

a company did conduct clinical trials of a helminthic therapy for crohn's, it didn't do well: http://www.drugs.com/clinical_trials/coronado-biosciences-ha...

Thank you for that information.

I note it wasn't hookworm, which is what helped my friend.

Or the pharma industry has become like Hollywood where it prefers to rehash a known drug, get a new patent on it, and make a few extra billion dollars for relatively low cost, instead of trying to innovate and "risk" more money in multiple projects that may or may not succeed.

Also, more profitable to spend money on advertising to maximize the return on existing treatments, than on trying to develop new drugs.

The current pharmaceutical market unfortunately seems to behave in odd ways.

It behaves in perfectly rational and understandable ways that correspond directly with the way it's incentivized. Developing new drugs is expensive, getting them approved is more expensive, and there's no guarantee it will work or be approved.

As a corporate entity, drug companies are capable of deploying investors' capital in a variety of ways. If they neglected the ways that actually made money, they would be short on investors pretty quickly.

Or, you know, increase public funding for research...

It seems to me that plenty of publicly funded research ends up simply pushing ideas which are subsequently developed and patented by companies. Perhaps I misread the situation, but that doesn't seem like it's in our best interests

That's why public funding should be directed at under-funded areas, like "processes and drugs that are not patentable".

Or, improve the independence and targeting of the research. For instance, having medical groups, patients associations, etc of X disease invest in research for X through crowdfunding.

Experiment [0] looks like a good example/PoC for this.

[0] https://experiment.com/

This also includes the interesting area of drugs which are already been patented and licensed but find new uses once out of patent for different conditions, Naltrexone being a prime example. google Dr Ian Zagon's work at Penn State if you are interested in his work on Naltrexone, OGF and opiod receptors generally.

Just curious, what would you think Vitamin C might treat?

You mean processes we don't know about? Probably they're out there. In general since a few animals including man lack the enzymes needed to make vitamin C themselves one might imagine that all the rest are indeed benefitting in various ways from that inbuilt metabolic advantage.

"current evidence favors the hypothesis that the multiple gains and losses in the ability to synthesize vitamin C are random, as would be expected for a neutral trait." - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3145266/

Are there any risks to taking 1000mg per day? I've always wondered that.

No clue. Here's what happened to me.

I'm a 6'5" 300 lbs male. I was taking upwards of 7g a day of vitamin c. Past that, I would get heavy flatulence, explosive diarrhea, and general gastronomic distress. I felt no change on my inside for doing excessive C, nor did I have any size effects other than the ones I noted for going past that.

One case, when I got sick, I was taking C. I wanted the illness to quit quickly, because I didn't want to be sick. So I took 8g C, 2 tablets of echinacea, and a NSAID. What happens was worse than any cold ever thought about being.

I killed off all my flora and fauna in my intestines. With this brought massive burning diarrhea (from the unneutralized stomach acid). I had this situation for 5 days straight. I was on the toilet at least 20x a day, day and night. Finally, day 6 had the formation of stool, which I cheered at. Day 7 and I was somewhat back to normal.

According to the NHS (http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/vitamins-minerals/Pages/Vitamin...), 1000mg is the typical cut-off for where vitamin C becomes toxic (which is dramatically higher than the 40mg a day most people actually need).

Probably not, but there's not much point in doing so, as you'll pee it all out anyway.

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