simple cure for cancer found, but cant be patented

Discussion in 'Science and Nature' started by dealwithit, May 23, 2011.

  1. Do NON-PROFIT organizations care about making money?
     
  2. I think the average life span of humans depends on where, and when, you look. It wasn't uncommon for some Native Americans, Mesoamericans, and South Americans to live 80+ years, but it was rare for the folks living on the other side of the Atlantic. When we're living in our own fecal matter and have a very poor understanding of hygiene, then modern medicine can make things better. A prime example of this is polio, which is most readily transferred through poop-to-mouth contact: if you want to eliminate this disease, which would you rather do: limit/eliminate the instances where it can be spread, or patent and sell medicine that will kill it regardless of how people live?

    I just find that, with most medicine, it's not about actual treatment, it's about covering up the symptoms of a diseased lifestyle. Most pharmaceuticals treat problems associated with disease, not the causes - this is why the best-selling drugs of all time include Lipitor for high cholesterol and some other one (can't remember which) for heartburn...

    I think my initial post may have come off too strongly, and covered too broad of a stroke. I am incorrect about my statement, in the regard that it's too generalized, but I still maintain that there are obvious cases where synthetic compounds aren't as good as natural compounds. The human body has not evolved in a sterile laboratory, so what makes us think the world we co-exist with is somehow second-place to a branch of science that has been around for a couple hundred years (if that) when all of our ancestors, whose genetic information we carry, has been based on nature's remedies?

    Perfect example, that nobody on this forum can deny: marinol vs. THC. :bongin:

    There's plenty of natural alternatives that are far more potent than any synthetic compounds...

    Show me a synthetic antioxidant that's more effective at neutralizing singlet-oxygen free radicals than lycopene.

    Show me a synthetic cannabinoid that's more effective at stimulating neurogenesis in the hypothalamus than THC.

    There are a variety of conditions that can be treated effectively using natural substances over synthetic ones. I'm not saying natural remedies are the best by far, nor are they exclusively and always the best, but we have a LOOOOOOOOONG way to go in our labs before we match the power of plant-based medicine.

    There is a disproportion between this "incredible work" done by drug companies to better our lives, and the work they do to get into our wallets. Look up the best-selling drugs of all time, then look up how much money America spends on health care every year, and finally look at obesity rates in the United States. If the quality of our health care was proportionate to the amount of money we gave drug companies, Americans would make Superman look like a couch potato.

    It's such a conglomerate cluster-fuck of an issue man. I understand where you're coming from on this, but keep in mind that pharmaceutical corporations are made up of business strategists, marketing teams, administrators, pharmacologists, bio-chemical engineers, mechanical engineers, chemists, public relations' officials, psychologists/psychiatrists, and lots of other professions.

    The health industry does not revolve around doctors, unfortunately. If that were the case, then doctors would prescribe running shoes to overweight people instead of pills to help them with high cholesterol and heartburn.

    It doesn't help that the FDA is corrupt as fuck either. The broad will unanimously approve medicine it knows is not safe at all. In 2006, a lady who works for the NRC sat in and recorded some meetings the Advisory Committee had, and she did a transcript of each meeting. You want to read what she says is a common occurrence for them? Here, you be the judge:

    Unanimous approval despite strong concerns? You gotta be kidding me. :rolleyes:

    One last one for you:

    I'm starting to get a headache man, and a little irritated. The FDA and the pharmaceutical corporations are fucked up. For the tiny amount of medicine they make that is beneficial to us, they really don't give a shit about consumer health.

    Also, if you want, I have the 54-page PDF of this study that can be uploaded should you choose to want to examine it. There is a ton of corruption that is so blatantly obvious, but nobody really cares about it, because the people are too busy watching Dancing With The Stars on TV to give a shit about what kind of pills they're taking.
     
  3. @Vitamin420: I wish I could rep you more lol. I repped you for a previous post but I will rep ya once I get the chance :D

    And I can't believe people think the pharmaceutical companies care about us so much :rolleyes:
     
  4. #24 Carl Weathers, May 29, 2011
    Last edited: May 29, 2011
    One word - penicillin (not under any patents, and still used widely). Infections have always been around, and before the discovery of penicillin were often the cause of death. Life expectancy improved from that discovery alone. I can still get an infection today and survive, whereas a long time ago my days could be numbered. That is not because I eat my own shit, we just live in a world shared with bacteria.

    Marinol is THC.

    No one is disagreeing that there are some examples where nature does it best. You have found a few examples, yet probably somewhere around 20% of the pharmaceuticals administered worldwide are derived from natural sources and these "subtle molecular changes" are made that improve efficacy, affinity and specificity, to give an all round better and safer drug.

    If you want to trade examples, think about how the Incas used to chew on willow bark for its analgesic properties. What was discovered to be the active ingredient was salicylic acid, which also irritates the lining of the gastrointestinal tract. What came out of the lab, aspirin.

    You can't base the entire work of pharmaceutical research on the success of Lipitor. Lipitor was a hit drug, and thanks to the lifestyle Americans want to live Pfizer has benefitted greatly. However there are generic statin drugs that work just as well as Lipitor, but since you live in a wholly capatilistic nation, Lipitor is the brand you all want. If you want to base all your opinions on the United States, then go to the politics section and complain about it.. because there is a whole world to consider, and many countries have a health system that the United States should be in envy of.


    It costs ~$800,000,000 to one billion dollars, and 10-15 years, to get a drug from discovery to the pharmacy. The hit-rate for a successful drug to make it through all the steps and validate the incredible cost is as low as 1/10,0000. Now maybe you can appreciate why the stakes are so high, and why they employ more than just chemists to make business decisions.

    Doctors are not employed by pharmaceutical companies. They do have meetings with them, are given big recommendations and little posters/clocks with brands stamped all over them. But at the end of the day, it is entirely up to them to prescribe exercise to their patient. But the patient doesn't want to hear that, the patient wants to watch the game and chew on Lipitor. My doctor is the kind of guy who leaves prescriptions as a last resort, and I guess if anyone has a problem with a drug pushing doctor they should find a better one.

    I don't doubt that there have been some sketchy approvals, but you shouldn't take these conspiracy/controversy articles as gospel because they're almost always biased to the full extreme. The FDA have rejected millions of drugs from Pfizer, Novartis, GSK, Merck, you name it. Sometimes long term toxicity is not known, and can't really be known until post-market surveillance. Finally, the FDA are not in charge of the entire world and they actually have no say in the drugs I take.. so again you need to consider not just the situation in America when considering the world of pharmaceutical development.

    To FDA's credit, they stamped out thalidomide as a safe drug back in the 1960s, where other approval agencies around the world did. The FDA ended up saving thousands of children from growing up with phocomelia!

    I'd like to take more of an indepth look at what you've given me but I regrettably have not got time today, I have a test tomorrow so you'll just have to bear with my hasty reply.


    Overall, I think that the existence of extremely wealthy pharmaceutical companies is quite unfortunate in that it fuels the fire for this aversion to science and medicinal advances. It's a scary thing, because we need medicine if we hope to improve the wellbeing of the millions of people out there with horrible diseases. There aren't plants to cure everyone. I wish it was the case, but it is not. The temptation to get into a stance that opposes science, technology and the pharmaceutical world is easy when you are fed these scary statistics, or just don't completely understand science. I think that if you have a rational mind, you will aim to prevent this tendency at all costs and weigh out the benefits and costs of having a world with pharmaceutical giants.
     
  5. Penicillin comes from fungi, doesn't it? :p bacteria aren't all bad for us. If it weren't for e. coli and thousands of other bacteria in our intestines, we would have a much harder time absorbing nutrition and living. Plants also rely on certain types of fungi to fix nitrogen for them so it can be absorbed through the roots. The world is inter-connected man, everything has evolved on the same planet in a complex web of life, which is why I'm trying to say that we should not think so highly of just pharmaceutical medicine. To me, it's not about nature vs. synthetic, it's about the combination of the two yielding results that are far better than any one could achieve.

    THC is not patented, Marinol is.

    Marinol is inferior to THC in clinical studies, I remember reading a double-blind study of several hundred patients with IBS where the difference between the groups was too great to be due to the placebo effect.

    The only reason for it's invention was because plants cannot be patented... not yet at least. :p

    Our understanding of our own biochemistry is so novice dude, we're amateurs who have just started down a very long and windy path of getting to know what exactly is "going on" in terms of our biological functions. We have accumulated much knowledge about these matters, but for every study that is done to further inquire the mechanics behind certain metabolic processes, the more questions we come up with! With recent technological advancements, the field of epigenetics has seen a lot of attention and is progressing our understanding in very profound ways.

    The universe is very mysterious, there is tons left for us to discover - even on our own planet. I think we underestimate the power of natural medicine, because we neglect to explore places like the Amazon for effective plants, which we can maybe even use as inspiration to make synthetic drugs. Vincristine and vinblastine are two compounds found in plants native to Madagascar that were incredibly effective in treating leukemia; significantly above the synthetic alternatives. Just by having this compound identified, we were able to improve its efficacy significantly and reduce side-effects - and this would be an example of how nature and pharma can work together. My issues with pharmaceutical corporations arise from the fact that, rather than trying to work with nature, they try to replace nature. Weed is illegal dude, and pharmaceuticals have a financial incentive to ensure it stays that way, because then large profits for a variety of prescription medicines are secured.

    If the pharmaceutical corporations truly cared for our health, wouldn't weed be legal? They certainly have the money to influence the FDA when it comes to more dangerous drugs being approved...

    I'd rather ingest something that irritates the lining of GI tract than cause ulcers, bleeding, Reye's syndrome, and hives among others. However, that's just me being facetious :p I see the point you're trying to make, and I do understand where you're going with this, but often times we take traditional medicine out of the traditional context. I believe the Egyptians had also used willow bark/leaves as medicine, but they had recipes which took several days and involved changes in temperature and pH, among others, to achieve the desired medicine. It was much like the modern day context of refining quality via methods developed in labs.

    I think there are ways to ensure medicine doesn't have to cost so much, but I think you can already see where I'm starting to go with this... ;)

    There's a book you should read called "Crazy Like Us" by Ethan Watters. If you can get it, read chapter 4, about how GlaxoSmithKline literally changed the Japanese perspectives of mental health and well-being in order to create a market for their antidepressant, Paxil. They spent millions of dollars changing cultural values and attitudes in order to do this - and there's pretty solid evidence backing this.

    They've rejected millions of drugs? I'm not sure where you come up with that number, because you earlier said it can cost from 800 mil to 1 bil dollars for ONE drug to get from R&D to the pharmacy. The very last step before the pharmacy is the FDA, because they're supposed to show up to the Approval Committee with everything in order just to get a stamp of approval to sell on the market. It's relatively inexpensive compared to the R&D.

    Anyways, whatever number the FDA has rejected is irrelevant to the real context, which is a ratio. The amount of drugs approved is significantly higher than the amount of drugs rejected - yet, as you read in some examples, there may be serious safety concerns despite the board voting unanimously for approval. The standards are too loose, which is why side-effects are so common - unless you mean to say that increased risk of suicide (up to 8x, as tested in 1980s on Paxil) is an acceptable side-effect for the treatment of depression.

    Well said, I'm not sure if we're on the same page but I can see what you're trying to say. I don't think it's a matter of one-versus-the-other, but a balanced approach utilizing both would be best. Cooperation always yields more favorable results than competition, and let's face it: there's plenty of room for more medicine on the market. It doesn't have to come at such a high cost though, which is the only thing these pharmaceutical giants really care about. The shareholders and investors aren't doctors, they're businessmen. They don't care what the fuck the company does as long as it makes them money, so those are the policies they're going to drive to ensure they always profit.

    The world is more open-source than it is pre-determined. Rather than having the scenario you described with pharmaceutical giants, I think it's in our capacity to alter things in the way we run our economies and participate in international markets, to make it so that pharmaceutical corporations could be a complement to a healthy lifestyle, rather than a precursor... which it all too often is nowadays.

    Anyways, I took several smoke breaks during this post and ate some grub. If something doesn't make sense or is confusing let me know and I'll clarify :)
     
  6. I appreciate your response, and my hat goes off to you for pointing out my poor choice of examples, in terms of penicillin. Although it was discovered in a (not so sterile) lab, it does indeed come from fungi. I should have thought about that before trying to be all smart haha. Well, I can sort of recover my example, because penicillin resistance came about not long after its discovery and the real lab work took over and modified penicillin to have bulky side chains to stop the bacterial resistance enzymes, and also formulated the combination of clavulanic acid. See, there is some good to come from labs :p.

    From reading your post, I really don't think our opinions differ a great deal. We both value naturally derived medicines, but seem to be coming from different viewpoints on the matter. I thought perhaps you didn't appreciate the level at which drug designers also follow nature, and if you asked chemist if they could imitate the synthetic power of enzymes in their lab, they would say no. Nature is a much better synthetic machine in a lot of cases, however, the naturally occurring compounds that show some medicinal value are not usually fine tuned for therapeutic application. This is likely spawns from the fact that, more often than not, when a plant produces a compound with therapeutic value it is by chance). So really, nature does a lot of work for drug design. There are ‘completely synthetic' approaches to designing drugs, too, but as I already said, a significant chunk of the drugs on the market have their roots in plants, fungi, or marine life. This goes for all research and design teams whether they're working for a big company or a university.

    I won't argue that the big guns in pharmaceutical development don't have financial interest close to heart, and that there haven't been questionable moments in their history. But their existence emerged from their success, and it has only snowballed from there. The tendency for people to think “ah, drugs… drug companies… money making bastards” and paint the entire world of pharmaceuticals with the same brush is not a productive attitude at all. It is, in my opinion, completely unrealistic to take a completely anti drug company stance, when mass production of drugs is simply a necessity to humankind in this age. There is no going back to raw plants, and there is a need for new research and development, which comes at a massive cost. It does not cost one billion dollars to develop a failed drug, of course. But to get from a concept to a failed drug, a significant amount is wasted. I should have phrased myself a lot better, in terms of ‘millions of drugs' being rejected, I was speaking in terms of drugs that enter the development pipeline that are abandoned for various reasons, be it through failure or rejection by the FDA. Keeping in mind that FDA approval must be met before and after clinical trials. If I thought more carefully, I would have refrained from posting in numbers, because I don't have statistics, and am operating on the knowledge of how difficult it is for a drug to succeed in all aspects of development.

    I also agree that there should be a shift in focus from treatment to prevention, and I can say that at least in my country, this policy has been adopted, and sluggishly I believe it is being rolled out. I think that the health system in the USA sounds very broken. I actually heard an amusing (potentially fictional) story, that if you take a sample from Lake Michigan, you will find trace concentrations of Prozac. There is most definitely room for improvement.
     
  7. :) Your point is well-made, and like you said further down in your response, I think we're pretty much coming to agreement on the same thing, but from different perspectives. I think that our points are both solid and arguable, but the scope of what we're trying to cover is so broad and so mysterious that there's really no "right" or "wrong" answer - it's just a matter of personal opinion, solidified only by the amount of evidence we can come up with.

    For instance, there are methicillin-resistant staph and other antibiotic-resistant bacteria that have evolved as a direct result of synthetic medicine being created. You see, when we consider the efficacy of medicine, we tend to believe it's one specific compound or molecule that is responsible for a host of changes, but really, a very complex system of compounds will work together holistically to provide the best result. This is why I feel like reducing medicine to specific chains of molecules isn't the right way to go about healing people, because then we run into problems with drug-resistant bacteria. In a matter of weeks/months, bacteria will be immune to the medicine it took years for us to research and develop.

    Yeah this is true, and the point I was alluding to just above is that the reason I feel natural compounds are so effective is because there's multiple compounds that each do seemingly unrelated things, but can work together to provide incredibly powerful results. Garlic has awesome anti-fungal, anti-bacterial/microbial compounds that work better in harmony with each other, where their strengths can complement others' weaknesses.

    What are we using to define the criteria of "success" ? If we're talking about economic well-being, then pharmaceutical corporations have succeeded tremendously well. If we're talking about fulfilling their duties to ensure the longevity and well-being of "patients," then I think there's some room for us to debate a little bit about whether this is accurate or not. Death from prescription medicine is not uncommon, unfortunately :(

    Yeah, the root of the problem is that it's so expensive to come up with the type of medicine we rely on nowadays, and we often think that there is a causal relationship between the amount of money spent on health care and the quality of health in that country. This is not so true - like you said, many countries have health care systems that the US should envy. Look at Macau, they have something like the highest or second highest life expectancy in the world, yet there are no schools there that teach Western medicine. To obtain a license as a physician, you must travel outside the country. They believe in free medicine - diet, qi/energy balance, massage, acupuncture, etc... and there is empirical evidence that would assert its efficacy. :)

    That story you heard is probably accurate to some degree :p I've seen reports of water samples around the country that have trace amounts of birth control, antidepressants, various toxins from plastics, synthetic hormones, herbicides/pesticides, so on and so forth.

    You're right, the health care system in the US is broken and it needs to be fixed. Autism has gone up by 1,779% since the 1970s. Cancer is on the climb, so is cardiac disease, diabetes, liver/kidney infections, and many other fatal/potentially-fatal lifestyle diseases. The sum of all goods produced in any one of over HALF the world's countries, is still less than the amount Americans spend on "health care," every year. It's really disproportionate man, and I think pharmaceutical corporations know what they're doing to some extent :(

    Anyways, thanks for the intellectual responses man. I'm glad we could share our knowledge here and discuss the issue in a mature way. Wish more people here on the city were like that... this one's for you buddy :bongin:
     
  8. your right, I don't have cancer. Nor would I approve them releasing a drug that's only been tested in 100 people to the masses. To me that's akin to snake oil salesmen. It may be the case that this drug actually kills 1 in 75 people but it just so happened that 25 of the people tested were close enough to a hospital or had some other combination of other drugs that countered the negative effects. Are you willing to put someone else's life at risk on the off chance?

    Now you released a drug that will kill hundreds if not thousands just because you thought the drug should be public. The average person has no idea what it really takes to make sure a drug won't kill a lot of people and just assume that it's the money factor that's keeping them from releasing it.

    As for money, it's not evil it's the people doing evil things that are. Just because you want to make money doesn't make you evil, it's your actions that do. And even then, some people will still call you evil because you can't please the whole village.
     
  9. The money factor is why 'big pharma' gets approval for selling drugs that are dangerous and don't even work very well at what they are supposed to do. I assume the money factor is the reason why we are punished for using marijuana or coca leaves.
    Big pharmaceutical companies are not just trying to make some money to make their life more comfortable. They aim for making shit-loads of money at the expense of the public, and at the expense of the public's health.

    I don't advocate releasing untested, or barely tested, drugs. There is not enough objective data there to say that it should be used in that manner.
    I was objecting to your attitude of "I can wait".
    Your attitude that pharmaceutical companies are just trying to make ends meet.:rolleyes:

    And yes, people are evil, money is just a thing, an idea, really. There are two main variations on the theme that I am familiar with, as sayings:
    Money is the root of all evil.
    The love of money is the root of all evil.

    I don't consider either one to be a cosmic truth or anything. The basic idea holds true though, that people lust after power, wealth, possessions, &c, and then do evil shit.

    Pharmaceutical companies, petro-chemical companies, these 'people' do not seem to have the well-being of life on this planet in mind. They exert massive pressure which greatly influences the world we live in.
    For all intensive purposes, they are evil, and I don't much care for the idea that people should sit around going "well, I'm sure they'll find a cure that can be profitable sooner or later. I can wait, I don't have cancer yet. Who can blame 'em for tryin to make a little scratch?"
     
  10. Well "subtle molecular changes" aren't always that great. Look at trans fats. Adding a simple hydrogen atom can cause arterial plaque buildup, which can lead to to death.

    Heart attack, stroke, coronary artery disease; all caused by "subtle molecular changes."
     
  11. For all intents and purposes. Just for future reference, not being a grammar nazi.


    The difference being that medicinal chemists purposefully make changes to drugs with receptor affinity to improve their PK/PD profile, and that what you're talking about is actually from hypercholesterolaemia. I'm not sure if you're talking about trans fats or saturated fats, but neither cause hypercholesterolaemia or arterial plaques.
     
  12. From Wikipedia:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans_fat#Health_risks
     

  13. Not quite sure where you're going with this. A quote from Wikipedia that is lacking a citation is not exactly first port of call... Besides any potential link between trans fat and atherosclerosis, your point is redundant, because small molecular changes in the context of drug design has absolutely nothing to do with trans fat/saturated fat and their associated risks.
     
  14. AIDS and cancer are MUCH TOO PROFITABLE for an (official) cure ever to be released by the pharma cartell.

    anybody who thinks this is outrageous better check the number #1 priority of any corporation in existence - hint: it ain't your health and well-being.
     
  15. Trans fats are unsaturated fats that are "changed molecularly" by adding a hydrogen atom. Trans fats cause plaque buildup in the arteries, and unsaturated fats don't.

    Therefore it is reasonable to assume that there is a correlation between the molecular alteration of trans fats and plaque buildup in arteries.
     
  16. #37 Carl Weathers, Jun 1, 2011
    Last edited: Jun 1, 2011
    It is reasonable to consider that there is some correlation between trans fats and formation of arterial plaque (naturally, as cholesterol and triglycerides go hand in hand), however it is not a direct link (correlation does not equal cause), and I'll say it once more - not relevant to drug design. Which is why I'm a little confused as to the point you are making here. Either way, I'm still interested, and if you have found evidence of a link between trans fats and hypercholesterolaemia or direct links to heart disease then I'd do well by reading them, but come up with something better than a comment on Wiki please !
     
  17. back on topic please
     
  18. Why Trans Fat Is So Bad For You

    Trans Fats 101 - Feature Story - University of Maryland Medicine

    Does Saturated Fat Clog arteries?

    Does anyone know a legitimate list of foods that clog arteries and cause heart attacks? - Yahoo! Answers

    Trans Fats: The Science and the Risks - Disease Prevention and Wellness Information to Improve Your Health on MedicineNet.com

    List Of Foods That Clog Arteries | LIVESTRONG.COM

    It's a well-known fact that trans fats clog arteries. This relates to the drug topic because you said many chemists take natural drugs and slightly alter their chemical makeup to "enhance" them. I pointed out that chemically altering something doesn't always "enhance" it. This is evident with trans fats. In an effort to reduce saturated fat intake, scientists took unsaturated fat and hydrogenated it (turning it into trans fat). This backfired, as we now know that trans fats cause clogging of arteries, which in turn can cause many complications and even death.
     
  19. NO. NEVER.

    But apparently, the University of Alberta collects donations to conduct clinical trials with DCA.
    Donations - DCA Research Information
     

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