Hacker News Reader

Comment by uslic001 | Hacker News Reader

One of the great successes of modern medicine. When I first started treating Hepatitis C patients in 1995 our Hepatitis C treatments had terrible side effects and rarely worked after 48 weeks of treatment. Now the treatments are 98% effective in 8-12 weeks and have minimal side effects. People need to stop saying that big pharma doesn't find cures.

View on HN

One caveat to "big pharma finds cures" is that, to my understanding, a lot of the research is done via public institutions, big pharma just handles the manufacturing and distribution.

I know adalimumab's discovery was funded (at least in part) by government grants, but Humira still made AbbVie richer than god.

Big Pharma also often handles the clinical trials and approvals. I don't know if there is a mechanism for a public lab to get approval for a medicine? Probably if we found a way to drive down the cost of clinical trials, we'd be able to structure the system in a way to eliminate the middle-men here, but that's much easier said than done.

Ah, good point... are clinical trials expensive to run?

A couple of billion per drug.

They are a bit more than half of the total drug R&D costs, so they cost more than all the research, experimental synthesis and pre-clinical experiments combined. If you've discovered a drug which works in vitro and on animals, and want to start clinical trials, you're not even halfway done.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com