Each year, hundreds of potentially world-changing treatments are discarded because scientists run out of cash. But where big pharma or altruists fear to tread, my friend and I have a solution. It’s repugnant, but it will work
This is both true and useful. Not many ideas are that, so this is worth considering. Read the full thing.
“Our idea is to charge desperate sick people to take part in clinical research. In particular, desperate sick people who are very rich – and their loved ones.
It’s a repugnant suggestion.”
Sorry, but why is it repugnant? There’s no pockets in a shroud. And unless you particularly want to leave money to kids or charity, you’d spend it to buy some more life, or even the chance of it if the end looks near.
It isn’t. But there will be lots of people shrieking that it is repugnant.
As the article says ” They’re called “pay to play” trials and, outside poorly regulated countries, they are expressly forbidden. Wretched and desolate patients drain their pension funds, bankrupt their families and sell their houses to join studies based on flimsy research for drugs that don’t work, and could kill”.
Here’s a use for the National Lottery money, rather than funding fake charities. Fund a real charity, one that is explicitly banned from political activity. Any profit, should one occur, goes 50:50 into more research and bigger prizes for the Lottery.
Not much to lose in trying it, eh?
This won’t fly. There are too many ways that the company could be sued. It doesn’t matter how many legal disclaimers are signed the heirs will come after them for killing their “loved” ones with a dangerous and unproven treatment, and stealing their inheritance for the privilege.
Is it a drug or a poison? It’s both. You want to poison the bad bits (e.g. tumours) and leave the rest alone. If it’s highly specific to the bad bits we call it a drug and it gets approved.
There are considerable hurdles that can stymie drug development. Approval rests on a one size fits all safety regime. But the tolerance of side effects should vary. If you are dying in agony you’re not so fussed if you get hypertension or hives. If you have a mild disease (e.g. covid) or have a condition progressing very slowly (prostate cancer, dementia) you do worry more about side effects.
Drugs that have shown promise in mice or monkeys but are abandoned for lack of funds should have some value. There are, as the writers admit, third parties with more money to invest, but the mechanism for transferring the ownership seems to be broken.
A third problem is in the patent process. Currently the developer has to file a patent application at a very early stage, meaning that by the time the drug is approved the exclusivity might only last a few years. Maybe the starting gun for patent duration should be moved to say the date of conclusion of stage two or stage three trials.
In principle I agree with the writers. It does seem a bit idiotic to restrict drug trials to healthy young men instead of those who actually stand to benefit.
dearieme: « Fund a real charity, one that is explicitly banned from political activity. »
That should really be all of them, if I vaguely remember a David Cameron promise along those lines.
“It does seem a bit idiotic to restrict drug trials to healthy young men instead of those who actually stand to benefit.”
It doesn’t… You need a human model that’s *healthy* ( for the purposes of the research) to check for the worst side-effects, if there are. Hence the usual near-teetotaller requirement.
To have a baseline and an idea what to expect when you feed the stuff to anyone who’s actually sick , and definitely not healthy, to see if the stuff actually works in live humans with the specific ailment a medicine is aimed at.
As with any Socialist Idea, the concept sounds logical, and nice, and useful.
The reality …. well… we see the results of those Socialist Ideas around us every single day. I don’t believe they have a large fanbase here….
And as pointed out above, Inheritance Lawyers ( and ambulance chasers in general ) would love this idea. Which should put a full thinking stop on the actual adviseability of it…..
OK, Grikath, suppose the rest of us agree that such drugs be tried out on “Inheritance Lawyers ( and ambulance chasers in general )”?
And “human rights lawyers”, natch.
” suppose the rest of us agree that such drugs be tried out on “Inheritance Lawyers ( and ambulance chasers in general )”?”
That is an absolutely great idea. Legislate that anyone practising law must take part in a drug trial at least once every 3 years. If you don’t then you immediately lose your right to practise. A small way for the leeches to give something back to society.
That would thin out the numbers of lawyers a bit, in more ways than one.
‘First let’s kill all the lawyers’.
Doesn’t sound as though opinions have changed much since Shakespeare’s day, Jim!!
“Our idea is to charge desperate sick people to take part in clinical research. In particular, desperate sick people who are very rich – and their loved ones.”
Rather late – that’s been going on for decades. Cancer treatments particularly are tried out with patient consent on terminal cases who have nothing to lose.
Two rich people I knew with cancer, travelled to another Country to take part in an experimental trial.
I like the idea here. Let people pay for possible gain.
The writer could have mentioned the dozen or so Nobel Laureates who tested new treatments on themselves, and the dozen more that died doing this. Their path to eternal glory was defeated by the very thing that could have taken them there.
As the wise men Tom and Tim have said ‘incentives matter’.
I don’t get why that Fondation Brocher came to have any formal say over anything though, the writer doesn’t explain.
In U.S., the government regulates drug development to death.
It’s the why of ‘scientists run out of cash.’
Save lives. Get government out of drug regulation.
In the UK a past Conservative government allowed Pharmaceutical companies to earn a return on their aggregate investment in research (through their sales to the NHS) so their scientists did *not* get their funding cut off if the research appeared worth-while. So, e.g., Glaxo’s profits on Ventolin could be used to fund their development of their anti-malaria vaccine [giving the vaccine away to low-income countries still came out of shareholder pockets but the research effectively did not].
Even when the Grauniad gets something partially right, its ignorance and incomppetence shows through.
From the article: “We know the Plutocratic Proposal works, because we’ve tried it.” But when it was tried the sponsor “died before the study could begin.”. So it doesn’t provide a motivation for someone to pay. A rich person might be motiovated to leave a legacy in their will to research a condition that they suffered from, but that’s nothing new. And if there are projects which have a reasonable prospect of success, we already have ways of funding them via governemnt grants and private charities. If thos article has a legitimate point it is merely that the funding might not be best allocated currently.
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