Originally Posted By: jaj
Originally Posted By: GROUCHO MARX
Billions of dollars have gotten us to the point where if your body can endure copious amounts of toxic chemotherapy, you may have a chance of surviving.
Pardon me if I'm not impressed.
A half-billion dollars is the current cost for getting a drug for pretty much any major disease from a lab bench to the bedside, and most of the cost is putting together and delivering the (literally) one-container-load of documents required to support FDA approval. And, you have to think of FDA approval not as a public health and safety issue but as lawyer-proofing.
Of the drug candidate compounds that start the journey, maybe one in 100 finishes. If one fails at the $450 million point, just at the threshold of approval, and many do, then most of the money is down the drain and it's back to the drawing board.
Nobody is trying to impress you. It's just that this stuff is really hard and it costs a lot of money. If you are prepared for a lower standard of testing and quality, approval could be cheaper and there would be more drugs on the market faster. But the money-grabbing legal vultures that pillage drug companies when a flaw goes undetected, for instance VIOXX, take away any urgency that companies and the FDA might have to try anything that's not perfect (and totally lawyer-proof).
I don't care what the drug companies are spending. They're in business to make money. Business plans fail.
I care about what's been promised from research if people DONATE their own money. Those promises are bull and offering people false hope is one of the worse sins that can be committed.
Originally Posted By: GROUCHO MARX
Billions of dollars have gotten us to the point where if your body can endure copious amounts of toxic chemotherapy, you may have a chance of surviving.
Pardon me if I'm not impressed.
A half-billion dollars is the current cost for getting a drug for pretty much any major disease from a lab bench to the bedside, and most of the cost is putting together and delivering the (literally) one-container-load of documents required to support FDA approval. And, you have to think of FDA approval not as a public health and safety issue but as lawyer-proofing.
Of the drug candidate compounds that start the journey, maybe one in 100 finishes. If one fails at the $450 million point, just at the threshold of approval, and many do, then most of the money is down the drain and it's back to the drawing board.
Nobody is trying to impress you. It's just that this stuff is really hard and it costs a lot of money. If you are prepared for a lower standard of testing and quality, approval could be cheaper and there would be more drugs on the market faster. But the money-grabbing legal vultures that pillage drug companies when a flaw goes undetected, for instance VIOXX, take away any urgency that companies and the FDA might have to try anything that's not perfect (and totally lawyer-proof).
I don't care what the drug companies are spending. They're in business to make money. Business plans fail.
I care about what's been promised from research if people DONATE their own money. Those promises are bull and offering people false hope is one of the worse sins that can be committed.
