Vaccine

[Kusherb]

Anyone else believe there would be a vaccine by now if large companies were not making so much of the drugs they sell us? Same goes for any other disease in the world. If anyone believes so can you please tell me ways in which i can help. Although its probable i will not make a difference, i always live in hope that one day we will not live in a world ruled by a small number of rich people only interested in power and full control of the population. safety x

 

[David]

I think that there is a ton of money to be made by any company that makes a viable vaccine. If they could come up with something, I'm sure they'd be more than happy to reap in the billions from it.

 

[DustyKat]

I hear what you are saying Kusherb.

I don't know that would have a vaccine for IBD but I too often wonder about the benefits to pharmaceuticals companies in keeping diseases at a place that require maintenance medication to control a condition. Far more money in that than a one off solution! The whole Helicobacter Pylori and stomach ulcers fiasco has forever tainted my view of the pharmaceuticals industry.....

Dusty.

 

[Kusherb]

I doubt that very much david, think how large the range of drugs people are given who suffer from crohns disease, some of the people on this forum are on drugs i have never even heard of. Clearly there is a lot more money in a constant supply of drugs rather than 1 vaccine which will only need to be used once per person, its just common sense really. It turns my stomach sick just thinking about what people have to go through just so a couple of c***ts can have a bit of money and keep this stupid system we have in place keep on running.

 

[katiesue1506]

I've been thinking about it... first off, while drug companies DO make a lot of money off of the maintenance medicines, drug companies aren't the ones who usually come up with cures. Cures usually come straight from academia. I also don't understand why people are so upset that drug companies make money. They put in a TON of money towards research and development, testing and trials (multiple trials to become FDA approved), and they have to pay the FDA to become approved. I would imagine it takes years to recoup the amounts of up front research and development money they pony up. Drug companies ARE a business. They don't have to develop the drugs that they do, but they do for societal good AND for profits. That's just how life works.

Secondly a vaccine would not be feasible for fixing Crohn's. The mechanism by which vaccines work is by utilizing the immune system. By introducing weakened or dead versions of a bacteria to the immune system, one can fight the sickness and learn how to keep that particular bacteria at bay. Crohn's is an over active immune system (well most signs point here anyways) and its least likely that its caused by a bacteria. There are no vaccines that change the DNA predisposition to any disease. This is why I hold out much hope for stem cell therapy.


I dunno... my motto for life is you get what you work hard for, and nothing comes for free

 

[Guest]

just noticed your location is in 'the hospital', Kusherb... you been in there since August?

 

[Kusherb]

@ Dingbat lol its a joke and in reply to Katiesue yes okay you have a valid point but i have personally spoken to a vaccine researcher (Tim Page, crohns.org/treatment/vaccine.htm, this link has info on him i dont have 15 posts so cant post it properly or sumin lol) and he has told me that he gets data, equipment and anything that will prevent further study and possible vaccine invention stolen from his labs etc. He told me personally that he knows its all the companies stealing this but he cant do anything about it just sit back and let all those rich f*ks continue to reap off of us.

 

[effdee]

The thought has crossed my mind. I'm not convinced doctors (or anyone else, for that matter) really knows what's going on with Crohn's/IBD yet. When I hear stories about how some people can go on a diet to alleviate symptoms while other people can eat anything and feel the same, it raises even more questions. I'd be very surprised if a truly viable treatment/cure was held back.

 

[Kusherb]

@ effdee, so ur saying doctors havent got a clue whats going on with crohns/IBD yet? But these doctors still subscribe all various types of drugs to us and lets face it those drugs have almost no effect (certainly no effect on me) on the majority of us.

 

[Lydia]

You mean something that cures you in one shot, or actually prevents the illness?! Excuse my skepticism. They make way too much money off us for that.

The only way they would do that is if the cure caused some other disease you needed life long treatment for.

I have very little faith in the drug companies.

 

[Creepy Lurker]

i have personally spoken to a vaccine researcher (Tim Page, crohns.org/treatment/vaccine.htm, this link has info on him i dont have 15 posts so cant post it properly or sumin lol) and he has told me that he gets data, equipment and anything that will prevent further study and possible vaccine invention stolen from his labs etc. He told me personally that he knows its all the companies stealing this but he cant do anything about it just sit back and let all those rich f*ks continue to reap off of us.

He's not a researcher of any kind. He's a fund raiser and nothing else. Any research he had would have belonged to other people. It's those people who should be targeted really.

http://www.communigate.co.uk/sussex/thechroniccrohnscampaignuk/page16.phtml

Research in the UK has the additional benefit that cures save the government huge amounts of money by revealing strain on the NHS. Healthy people inevitably cost less money.

This is actually a MAP vaccine. The link between MAP and Crohn's is still disputed. I'm struggling to find any mention of it since 2005 which suggests that it may well have been abandoned. Ignoring that though, I think we can all agree that no pharma company would even contemplate eliminating MAP to cure Crohn's


-- Edit

After a bit more digging, I've found the actual researcher. Professor John Hermon-Taylor (who's now at King College, London). Anybody want to email and ask how often his research is stolen?


-- Edit 2
Reworded so I don't sound like an a-hole. Just because I'm feeling a bit rough of late doesn't give me the right to be mean

 

[saidinstouch]

Just a little back of the envelope math for you guys who think prescriptions are overpriced. A drug takes roughly 1.3-1.5 billion US dollars to bring to market (roughly 100-150 million per project, and 10-15 projects that go into trials to get a successful drug). Now, most companies get lets be generous and say 10 years of protection from generics (when their profits go essentially to 0), but in reality 5- years is more likely. This means the drug has to make 100 million US dollars a year for them to break even 10 years down the road from developing one successful drug (and trying a bunch of others that failed). Now lets go with an average of $1,000/month for a prescription...so $12,000 a year per person of income (not profit). That means to make 100 million (assuming pure profit, which isn't the case since most drugs do actually cost quite a bit to manufacture due to complicated synthesis that is optimized over years) would need 8300 people. That doesn't sound like a lot of people, but then lets be more realistic and say they get 5 years of patent protection then you need 16600 people on it 12 months of the year at 1000 a month. Then lets say you really only profit 500 a prescription and now its 33000 people roughly who have to be on your drug for 60 months in a row. Doesn't sound so bad right?

Well figure in the US there are rougly 700,000-800,000 people with CD (http://www.ccfa.org/info/about/crohns) and there are probably a good 20 treatments for crohns disease (not a uniform distribution true, but we progress through a number of treatments every couple years, so I will just assume uniform)/ That means at any given time there are around 35,000-40,000 people on any treatment at a given time. So, now the company isn't actually making very much money on their drug if you go with my much less favorable estimate, and at best they are making 2-4 times their costs with my absolute most generous estimation. So they make a big blockbuster drug that pays for itself and the development of 2-4 other drugs. Well that money gets divided into a lot of other areas too...such as funding people in academia who do the research that could lead to understanding the true pathogenesis of the disease (I have talked to one of the leading microbiome experts and he doesn't really believe the MAP connection) and then subsequent treatments that address the cause, rather than cutting off the pathways that lead to inflammation and disease.

So essentially, drugs are not nearly as overpriced as you really think. I haven't ever posted the actual numbers for you guys before, but these are numbers I have heard time and again both from industry sources and professors who have no ties to the industry as well as people who used to be in the industry, but currently possess no ties to it. It sucks having the numbers right there in front of you, but the reality is most drugs don't become billion dollar blockbusters. If they do, the science is generally completely groundbreaking as far as treatments go and you are paying either for a treatment for a disease that wasn't treatable before, or for a better treatment with fewer side effects and/or treats the disease better.

I do agree that it sucks for us as consumers/patients to have the drugs cost so much, but if we want new drug research to go on, then the price is what it has to be to enable that to occur. The real problem is insurance companies with bad prescription plans that basically screw people with diseases like ours over by not covering the best (or even most) treatments very well. You want to make drugs more affordable, then the insurance companies need to be more accountable to patients like us.

 

[Lydia]

And yet they still manage to make so much profit.....Funny I used to work for that industry. They didnt seem so hard up to me.

The only drugs that are actually hard to make profit are biologics. They need a huge amount a starting material and time, with very little end product and the process is very finicky. Most other drugs are made for pennies on the dollar, in batch processes. I used to be a QC Chemist for a major pharmaceutical company in one of their plants. I did that for 4 years before I settled down and had a family.

 

[Lydia]

This is a really good article in the Canadian Medical Assoc. on the profit margins in the pharma industry. I will quote a small exerpt.


http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/full/171/12/1451

Profits

Although the pharmaceutical industry claims to be a high-risk business, year after year drug companies enjoy higher profits than any other industry. In 2002, for example, the top 10 drug companies in the United States had a median profit margin of 17%, compared with only 3.1% for all the other industries on the Fortune 500 list.1 Indeed, subtracting losses from gains, those 10 companies made more in profits that year than the other 490 companies put together. Pfizer, the world's number-one drug company, had a profit margin of 26% of sales. In 2003, for the first time in over 2 decades, the pharmaceutical industry fell slightly from its number-one spot to third, but this was explained by special circumstances, including Pfizer's purchase of another drug giant, Pharmacia, which cut into its profits for the year. The industry's profits were still an extraordinary 14% of sales, well above the median of 4.6% for other industries.2 A business that is consistently so profitable can hardly be considered risky.

Excess profits are, of course, the result of excess prices — and prices are excessive principally in the United States, the only advanced country that does not limit pharmaceutical price increases in some way. Of the top 10 drug companies in the world, 5 are European and 5 are American, but all of them have the US as their major profit centre. In the US, uninsured patients (of which there are many) are charged more for drugs than those who have large insurance companies to bargain for them, and the prices of prescription drugs are generally much higher to start with than in other advanced countries. Moreover, the prices of top-selling drugs are routinely jacked up in the US at 2 to 3 times the general rate of inflation.1,3,4

 

[DustyKat]

This is a 10 year old program regarding our PBS (Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme) and the role of industry in trying to make changes to the system. It is a transcript and makes for interesting reading, it's long though and may be a little confusing to those not familiar with the system..........................

http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/stories/s248583.htm

Dusty.

 

[effdee]

Thanks for these posts, everyone. Great information.

 

[Sue-2009]

Where is the answer? I don't know! It is so frustrating. We need the medicine. Everyone goes to work to make money. Insurance companies want to make money. Pharmaceutical companies want to make money....Its such a vicious cycle...Its scary! Bottom line, we need the medication. We don't WANT it...We NEED it! It is so frustrating. What a mess. Sue