What's needed is a new payment model for anti-infectives. This already happens at a small scale with grants from institutions like BARDA. The DOD of also does this for vaccines for biological weapons like anthrax where there is a high likelihood the drug will never be used, but a vaccine is needed because if there is an outbreak, the consequences are severe.<p>Basically, rather than paying for drugs on a per unit basis, you pay a lump sum for access to the drug. This solves the issues of spending $100M to develop a new treatment for some disease where there is never a outbreak and you cover none of the cost of R&D.<p>There have been ideas to have X-Prizes for new antibiotics. Discover a new drug for a anti-biotic resistant infection? Great, here is $500M as long as you agree to produce as much drug as needed for free or some nominal cost.
Perhaps they’re behaving entirely rationally. Infectious diseases do not kill that many people compared to cancer in America.<p>We may have a bad “flu” year this year, with a spike of elderly deaths, but we have a bad cancer year every year.
Are there national laboratories with the capabilities to find a cure?<p>Is there a NASA equivalent for infectious diseases to launch a covid-19 moonshot?
The article mentions the difficulties with clinical trials. It makes sense, now China running hundreds of studies on coronovirus with thousands of people: <a href="http://www.chictr.org.cn/searchprojen.aspx?title=&officialname=&subjectid=&secondaryid=&applier=&studyleader=&ethicalcommitteesanction=&sponsor=&studyailment=coronavirus&studyailmentcode=&studytype=0&studystage=0&studydesign=0&minstudyexecutetime=&maxstudyexecutetime=&recruitmentstatus=0&gender=0&agreetosign=&secsponsor=&regno=&regstatus=0&country=&province=&city=&institution=&institutionlevel=&measure=&intercode=&sourceofspends=&createyear=0&isuploadrf=&whetherpublic=&btngo=btn&verifycode=&page=1" rel="nofollow">http://www.chictr.org.cn/searchprojen.aspx?title=&officialna...</a> testing few drugs and their combination at a time, it's hard to do outside of epidemic.
Why are we surprised? If the incentives are not for curing infectious diseases than they won't do it. For big pharma, the incentives are: keep humans sick as long as it is physically possible and charge along the way.
1:0 for Capitalism vs. Humanity.<p>Exactly this is why the motivation to do at least some things should not be bound to earning profit.<p>There is common goods that we need to share, global issues that need to be addressed together and we need to find ways to achieve this if we want to develop further as a civilization.<p>Money must not be the sole reason why we do things or we will fail with this "strategy" and we need to come up with good ideas for an alternative and try it.<p>I know this will probably not make me very popular especially with people living in the US as their minds are constantly being flooded with the idea that everything straying from capitalism is socialism and therefor evil. I will post it nevertheless, down-votes don't hurt and I will write my opinion until it is censored completely.
I would imagine living customers and a workforce that is not quarantined would be reason enough, but hindsight is 20/20. It would be silly if the offices of a big pharma company are closed due to an infectious disease that the big pharma company would have been best suited to tackle but cant due to neglect in fighting infectious diseases.
one way around this is to develop platforms which apply to a range of diseases. why reinvent some fancy shape of atoms for each disease? it's entirely possible to develop something which works on cancer and coronavirus. just look at CRISPR, or RNAi ... master delivery and you can simply re-target the therapy toward different sequences.<p>Here (<a href="https://github.com/bionicles/coronavirus" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/bionicles/coronavirus</a>) is code to design CRISPR-Cas13 CARVER (<a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1097276519306987?via%3Dihub" rel="nofollow">https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109727651...</a>) 30mer guides against regions of Coronavirus conserved between SARS, MERS, HKU1, and SARS-nCoV-2 (Covid-19 Virus) and not found in highly expressed Lung protein-coding RNA. Uses BioPython, Redis SADD/SISMEMBER, and tools from EMBL (Emboss Consensus and Clustal Omega Alignment) and data from NCBI. The good news is, it's probably possible to delete Coronavirus genome directly inside the lungs, without vaccines; just deliver nanoparticles or adenovirus (doesn't replicate) with an inhaler and express CRISPR-Cas13 and the gRNA using the Surfactant promoter sequence for lung-only expression of the therapy<p>disclaimer: I need to work on the readme and write a blog post, but the data is there and the general core works. There's ~30k guides possible and 226 target 13 longest conserved regions across 4 different outbreaks spanning 17 years of virus evolution (provides reasonable confidence these regions are necessary for the virus to function)<p>If anyone knows some folks in the Pharma / Biotech industry I could use help to run the tests on this, tell em to email bion at bitpharma.com<p>edit: readme improved. currently looking for promoter consensus sequences for lung (surfactant protein TFs like TTF-1)
I think governments should take charge in this. Look at how much the development of the ebola vaccine bounced around for years. <a href="https://www.statnews.com/2020/01/07/inside-story-scientists-produced-world-first-ebola-vaccine/" rel="nofollow">https://www.statnews.com/2020/01/07/inside-story-scientists-...</a>
The opportunity is a generalized approach to solving these diseases which i think we are getting to finally. Thats the true promise of digital technology.<p>Thats how incentives gets aligned.
Since COVID-19 is targeting elders, I can imagine there are evil capitalists or bureaucrats who view this pandemic as a gigantic economic stimulus for the next decade. Sorry for my evil thought.
...as they develop a vaccine for Ebola.<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola_vaccine" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola_vaccine</a>
How can you target "new" infectious diseases if they are really "new" every year other than by guessing the right vaccine (as they do e.g. for the flu)? I mean, what worked for SARS won't necessarily work for COVID19, even though it's also a subvariant of SARS. If this is the case, by the time you come up with a drug and take it through all the (extremely costly) stages of testing approval, it'll be too late already, and herd immunity would have obviated the need for what you've just invested billions and countless person-years into.
I thought the "party line" was that private industry doesn't accomplish much if anything, so isn't "big pharma" irrelevant? It makes more sense to demand higher taxes and more basic research.
What a pile of sensationalist rubbish.<p>In 2018 we had an estimated 400k people dying of Malaria [1] & around 600k (est.) people dying of cancer in the US alone. [2] Compare that to the 3110 deaths that have happened in the last 3 or so months for COVID-19. [3]<p>I think a little perspective would go a long way here.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/world-malaria-report-2019" rel="nofollow">https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/world-m...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.cancer.org/research/cancer-facts-statistics/all-cancer-facts-figures/cancer-facts-figures-2019.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cancer.org/research/cancer-facts-statistics/all-...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-media-briefing-on-covid-19---3-march-2020" rel="nofollow">https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/who-director-general-...</a>