Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for March 30, 2010

Last month, a local doctor grew a culture and confirmed a cure that Big Labs have been working on (still are) for 6 years. Big Lab still has some budget left, so it may be awhile before they “find” this cure.

and part of the remaining funds will got to “pay off” the local doctor

Ahh, priceless! LOLs! X-D

It might be funnier if it was not so true. Comics and comedians have always told more truth than any politician dare.

Way Too True!

That’s why you will never see a cure for anything . There is no money in cures, just ” research”.

Consensus , sad and I also agree .

one of the worst chewings I ever got was for finishing two jobs on time and under-budget when I was working for the state…they said I cost them for the next year’s budget…go figure!!

Ditto on the above comments. “Job Security”-You gotta both love it and hate it.

samantics!

I agree that the culture in many companies is to spend the budget so you don’t lose it. However, there have been hundreds (if not thousands) of discoveries in medicine in the last decade. Cancer cure rates are going up. Cancer deaths are going down. My son was in treatment for cancer recently and was given dozens of experimental drugs to find the magic bullet. None of it worked on him, but it did on others. The FDA is slow to approve new drugs, but they will allow dying patients to have drugs that are not approved. It is called “compassionate approval”. Don’t ever sell our medical researchers short.

I’ve donated to many, many “worthwhile” medical research programs, yet I’m still losing friends, family members and acquaintances to diseases like breast cancer, multiple sclerosis and ALS. Why don’t the researchers give us just one “little” cure!

I’m going to play devil’s advocate for a sec here… Let’s say the researchers and big pharma have found cures, etc… but problems arise when the diseases mutate, which requires more research to find another cure for that mutation, and so on and so forth. I’m not saying that I’m right or wrong, just putting another thought out there…

The March of Dimes fought polio’

Salk developed a vaccine with out their help

Hundreds of fundraising jobs threatened.

March of Dimes switched to birth defects

Job security.

@Lewreader– that’s not a bad thing. Having conquered polio, they picked another target and moved on. Whether they directly contributed to Salk, they had some effect.

That said, it would be nice to have more cures: I lost both my parents, and my wife’s folks aren’t looking too good, despite being only 80.

HEY,LAAAAADDDEEEEEE!!! Don’t forget Jerry Lewis is breakin’ his back for MD. Had some woman who was ‘cured’ , years back on the Telethon who danced with him for the first time in years. At least thats what I recall.

Successfully finding a cure means that getting funding from that point on becomes much, much easier. And the vast majority of the medical knowledge used to find one cure can be carried over to the many other areas of medical research, which has advanced significantly over the past few decades.

I think there is far more money in finding cures for things we never used to worry about curing.

You mean the big industry has money coming into it for no reason? That business corrupts the government? That people paid by the industry will witness to anything for a buck? We need to tell Comp doctors so they don’t get corrupted. Otherwise this could spread to the medical profession.

Don’t forget to look at the FDA. They’re complicit also.

The global warmists work this way too. They make sure to find a “problem” so they can keep getting government grants for “study”. Then manipulate the results to find more problems so it needs more study.

As one biochemical research who has worked for both Big Pharma and Smaller Biotechs, I can tell you that the road to finding a NCE (new chemical entitiy) to becoming a new drug takes on average 8 - 12 years. The Drug Discovery process can easily take 2-4 years to go through all of the primary and secondary testing to make sure that the particular chemical compound is doing what it is supposed to be doing in the target biological system (in other words, that the compound is targeting the right thing). This process is really no different than finding a needle in a haystack. After all of this, then there need to be a host of pharamcological and animal testing to ensure the correct dosages and toxicology. This part could take another 1-2 years. Finally there are drug/clinical trials. The FDA requires at least 4-5 rounds of trials to ensure that it is safe on humans.

After 20 years in the industry, I have only worked on one project that ever had a compound reach the 3rd round of clinical trials.

We are trying to get it right the first time though, or have back-up candidates, but it is not very easy.

Cancer drugs routinely effect different targets in the cancer pathway , so you need to find drugs that are very selective.

Alzheihmer’s and other Nerurodegenerative diseases sometimes require drugs that can pass through the Blood-Brain Barrier. This is not a very easy thing to achieve either.

We are doing our best, but unfortunately, this is why drug companies charge what they charge. it is not because they are being malicious, it is called ROI – return on Investment. If they do not have this money coming in, further research and drug discovery will stop.

Personally, I think Wiley is poking fun at the start-up biotechs who often raise money from Venture Captialists and other private sources.

another angle

some years ago a female friend found that her (somewhat experimental) medication was affecting her hormones. When she asked her doctor for advice, he responded that he did not know the effect of these, or many other, drugs on women as they are not usually tested on females!

She then discovered that medical students are often not trained on female cadavers!

In other words, the medical model is a male one …

Craigor: I’ve been there. Antibiotics can lose effectiveness. What cures you will make me sicker. FDA killed a drug that had indications of healing arthritic joints. Caused upset tummies in some test subjects.

As a consulting scientist, every time I solve “the problem,” I have worked myself out of another contract.

True as life.

sorry, should have added the doctor’s comment that this was to avoid potential lawsuits from the subsequent children of women who do agree to be guinea pigs. My friend offered to be on the test panel and was accepted once she had proven that she had had a hysterectomy

@HappyChappy

Why do you think more people get their “news” from Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, and Stephen Colbert?

Who corrupts who? Huge question, kinda l ike which came first, the chicken or the egg? I lean toward gov’t being the corruptor because most politicians are lawyers, and they merely look at making a name for themselves by setting precedents as lawyers or passing uneeded (but thought needed) laws. The amount of vaccines we pump into our children these days disturbs me. Polio vaccine, ok, I can see the need, but chicken pox? Seriously? I remember as a kid being dragged over to my cousins house to catch his chicken pox one summer so I wouldn’t get it during the school year lol. But now my children are sent home if they don’t have this vaccine. 15 years so far in the military, and I think my kids get more shots than I do!

Is this because Big Pharm lobbys politicians to do this, or because some politician wants to make a name for themselves and pass something? (think John Edwards pushing for more C-section births, a much un-needed thing)

After finding the cure he must then find a disease. Like Restless Leg Syndrome?

This all is a good argument for funding pure research for its own sake, not based on its results in terms of solving a problem. As was said, once a problem is solved, the need to solve it disappears, and so does the funding – which gives the researchers exactly the wrong incentive: don’t solve the problem, and keep the money flowing.

Most public servants are paid just to be there, stand ready, and continually improve their skills, whether they’re immediately needed or not. Police officers and fire fighters, for example, get paid the same whether or not there are crimes to solve, or fires to be put out. Why? Because society works better that way.

Maybe it’s too much of a stretch in a fix-this-now society to suggest that the same model should apply to scientific and medical research…but I think it should.

On the other hand, I used to work for a research company that solved other people’s problems. One big corporation used up 95% of the sample and three months getting nowhere, so they brought it to us. One of our people worked over the weekend on the other 5%, returning almost all of it undamaged, solved the problem–and they balked when he charged them $10,000. Heck, it probably cost them five times that much per day in down time–so eventually they paid. $800 an hour is not much for expertise and overtime.

Why is money so much more important than our health?

As a scientist, I find it much easier to get other projects after actually accomplishing something on the ones I have. Plus, what medical scientist wouldn’t want the glory of curing a major disease?

You’d think they’d be running out of mindboggling names for all those meds and cures by now….like Azithromycin….Xifaxan….Rectmiaz…..

No worries, the other department getting funding is the disease-CREATING department. You’ll still have a job

Musmo, I hope you notice my comment on this NON SEQUITOR. What the heck ALS stands for? And what is it about? It is so NEW to me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZPZG92iYE4

Good Comments. Years ago, I asked my team of doctors about a drug I had heard of and if it would be suitable for me. They said they had never heard of it. Over an hour later they rushed into my room to tell me that it would be ideal but it wasn’t available in the U.S. I would have to go to Germany to get it. About 6 or seven years later it became available in the States.

Before the drug companies started shoveling massive amounts of cash into advertising - which wasn’t all that long ago - where did they put their money?

Craigor – Thanks for your input. Very interesting.

Everybody should read the recent Wired article on the use of inbred mice in the laboratory. It was fascinating.

Just in case you were serious wildmustang:

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), often referred to as “Lou Gehrig’s Disease,” is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord. From http://www.alsa.org/als/what.cfm

Just to follow up, the Europeans make as many medical breakthroughs as we do, and for less profit. As someone in a totally different field of science, the explanation is easy: we researchers do this for the sheer thrill of solving a puzzle.

What happens AFTER the puzzle is solved is another issue. For me, it’s on to the next project, as there is no money involved. However, if profits are involved, then shareholders have to be pleased. After all, we wouldn’t want THEM to have to work, would we? (Actually, it probably would be pretty disastrous if they did, come to think on it….)

Faolain: The official excuse for not using women is that their hormone levels flux too much relative to men. This has since been shown to be incorrect in most cases, and an important parameter in the cases when it is. However, the tradition lives on because “that’s just the way it’s done.” Hopefully more women in research will cause that to change.

Craigor - Thanks for your input. I’m a cancer survivor who’s taken more different medications over the years than I can count. The cancer meds knocked me for a loop, but I’ve been cancer-free for 5 years now. As for all that testing… I was given a brand-name (expensive) drug for another problem, and it did the job but had all sorts of side effects. By dumb luck I was given a generic which (by law) has it’s formula slightly different from the brand-name. SHAZAM! A lower dose did the job, with no side effects! And THAT’S why they have to do so many tests!

Thanks, Wiley, for a painfully funny strip!

Mark as insightful posters: iantheevil HidariMak gbrucewilson Craigor

There’s always something else to be cured, once your team is the one that found the magic bullet - you get all the funding you want, and diseases are very complex - oftentimes depends on genetics, etc. Overall cure rates have increased and it is absolutely incredible what there is down the pike - cancer vaccines, diseases which were considered totally incurable having cure rates. treatments customized to your genetics, and so on.

Unfortunately it takes many years for treatments to get approved.

What ever happened to scientific ethics? Oh, wait. Money and ethics don’t mix.

Yeah, even if a cure is found, the American Medical Association is very resistant to change. Couple this with the fact that the FDA has made some really bad mistakes in approving meds without proper research into long-term side effects (remember Phen-Fen?), they require a drug or treatment to go through years of human testing even if it has decades of animal tests (animal testing, no matter how closely said animal’s physiology matches ours, is deplorable and simply no substitute for actual human testing; and please, no “animal testing saves lives” arguments, since I’ve heard all the rhetoric before). So of course it will take years, maybe decades, for a new drug or treatment to reach the market. Well, that and the fact that pharma companies get federal grants to fund their work. Never mind the individual researchers who get greedy and postpone release of a potentially-revolutionary new drug or treatment in favor of more research and thus more of the almighty dollar. Or are ordered to do more research by the bureaucrats in charge for more of said dollar. It’s more immediately profitable to work on something indefinitely than it is to release something and gain royalties since medical patents legally only last a few years at most before less costly “generic” versions can be made and said drug/treatment might as well not exist for all the money it’ll make the original creator.

It’s really tempting to be cynical about this process. But, remember, they are saving lives. Could it happen faster? Yep. Would that help things and hurt things at the same time? Yep. somebody is right. Wiley’s a big trouble maker, just like all great artists…..

Sure, research and diseases are complex. The complexity just make it easier for foul play. Eli Lilley did research on one of their pills, Synthroid, to see if the generic was as effective as their pill. It turned out it was, at one-tenth the cost. Well, this was Eli Lilley’s research, bought and paid for, so they had the right to bury the findings. THAT IS CROOKED, PURE AND SIMPLY.

rac0308 Thanks! Now I know what ALS is for. Similar as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Hmmmmm……

@Wildmustang1262 Re: ALS

No, ALS and “Lou Gehrig’s Disease” are the same thing. ALS is known as “Lou Gehrig’s Disease” because Lou Gehrig was the first famous person diagnosed with it.

Probably the best-known current person with ALS is Stephen Hawking.

I think that Wildmustang1262 is probably not a native English speaker and what he/she meant is that it is familiar to them as Lou Gehrig’s disease (and the use of the word “similar” was just an error).

Some people obviously don’t grasp the major differences between private/internal funding as performed by “Big Pharma” and government funding of academic research groups. Alas, ignorance is bliss!

Some people obviously don’t grasp the major differences between private/internal funding as performed by “Big Pharma” and government funding of academic research groups. Alas, ignorance is bliss!

Just to point out some things as well. If aspirin were discovered today, it likely would have approval issues for its list of potential side-effects. (http://www.medicalprogresstoday.com/spotlight/spotlight_indarchive.php?id=1039)

Also, while were at it , lets ban DHMO [Dihydrogen Monoxide] (http://www.gumbopages.com/fridge/dmho.html).

BTW: Dihydrogen Monoxide ==> HHOH or H20 (water). Enjoy your day!

Private funding, federal funding, I really don’t care which it is. Privates are what I was referring to (thanks Sharpshooter308), but take a look at some of the studies that get federal funding–and not just from the American gummint. Things like studies to find out what days people are happiest on (gee, could it be WEEKENDS!? By jove, it is! And I knew that without any multi-million dollar study; yes, that was a REAL federally-funded study). It’s ridiculous what gets federal grants “in the name of research.” We need to find the people responsible for approving such frivolous studies; they’d make excellent lab monkeys for a study on why people can be so clueless.