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Comment by blackeyeblitzar | Hacker News Reader

Aren’t compounding pharmacies meant to solve this? I’m not familiar with how they work but I remember small family compounding pharmacies used to be everywhere. Now you never see them and I’ve heard some states like California are trying to get rid of them.

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Are you thinking of the correct term? Compounding pharmacies provide simple drug manufacturing tasks, like pressing pills from raw ingredients or splitting and mixing liquid drugs.

Some regulators dont like them because the medicine and dosages they produce do not need FDA review for safety or efficacy.

I was working in a college job for a pharmaceutical distributor when the New England Compounding Center outbreak happened. I think that dropped a nuke on the whole industry. We stopped dealing with compounding pharmacies after that because that whole thing was more like a matter of when not if.

I'm most familiar with them for off label ocular injections. Avastin is a common medication for colorectal cancer, but has an extremely similar biologic to Lucentis, used of ocular injections. Compounding pharmacies will breakdown Avastin because it is cheaper than Lucentis, and pre-fill disposable syringes.

I think I am. But maybe I’m wrong. What I remember is these pharmacies could basically make prescription drugs locally and do custom drugs and things like that because they worked differently from big pharmacies. That was what kept them surviving as small businesses. But over time they’ve just disappeared. At least in places I’ve lived and traveled to.

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