>First the pharma/cancer industry is a giant conspiracy working against the health and needs of cancer patients everywhere.
as a former insider, i will tell you that this is not the case.
the real case is not nearly as bad:
imagine two therapies that are in prototyping phase, being tested extensively in hundreds or thousands of tumor-prone and heavily irradiated mice, but still not yet ready for clinical trials in humans.
one of the therapies is cheaper to produce, has one or more cousin-drugs that have cleared the trial process and have FDA approval, and does a worse job at treating the mice when they inevitably develop knots of tumors. the mice who get this therapy die faster, and from the looks of it, they suffer horrendously in the meantime. it affects most of the models of mice in the same way; there are populations which suffer slightly less, but it's still awful. there is a 20% minority of mice that don't respond to this treatment at all.
the other therapy is more expensive to produce-- let's say by about 10%-- but there's no precedent for its use in humans, or if there have been trials in cousin drugs, the trials have not panned out for reasons that many say were merely statistical blips. but in the mice, it's a winner-- they die slower, and don't seem to suffer nearly as much. in some of the mouse models, it's an even bigger winner, and can be curative. and in a few of the mice, it doesn't seem to be effective at all, but this is a small minority-- let's say 5%.
which therapy does the pharma company push forward into clinical trials, and which does it shelve?
the answer is that neither are shelved, but the first therapy goes to the clinical pipeline first, which puts the second therapy at least a few years behind it before hitting the market, assuming it clears trials and the FDA, which it might not.
the risk of the superior treatment's failure is only tolerable by the pharmas if there's a recent success in hand.
this is why patients get shafted in the short run; their suffering is irrelevant to the risk of drug development as far as the pharma execs care.
the first drug will clear the clinical trial process more reliably, which means that it'll get busy treating patients faster, which means that it'll be a moneymaker faster-- even if its side effects make it a second or third line of treatment right out of the gate.
this leads to having a lot of shitty drugs that aren't very effective, but they're better than nothing, and they're probably better than what came before.
then, a few years later, we see the wonder cures. the wonder cures exist in the same therapy ecosystem as the shitty drugs, which now have a few more years of familiarity behind them.
there's one more wrinkle: the drug company doesn't want its drugs to be competing with each other. so the original shitty drug goes back to the mice and likely back to the clinical trials for a different use case, which it gets approval for-- viola, a "new drug" for cancer.
so the pharma companies save lives, often miraculously. as a former scientist, i am proud to have contributed to that.
but it is the nature of the pharma companies to serve humanity's purposes very poorly as a result of the financial incentives they face.
as a former insider, i will tell you that this is not the case.
the real case is not nearly as bad:
imagine two therapies that are in prototyping phase, being tested extensively in hundreds or thousands of tumor-prone and heavily irradiated mice, but still not yet ready for clinical trials in humans.
one of the therapies is cheaper to produce, has one or more cousin-drugs that have cleared the trial process and have FDA approval, and does a worse job at treating the mice when they inevitably develop knots of tumors. the mice who get this therapy die faster, and from the looks of it, they suffer horrendously in the meantime. it affects most of the models of mice in the same way; there are populations which suffer slightly less, but it's still awful. there is a 20% minority of mice that don't respond to this treatment at all.
the other therapy is more expensive to produce-- let's say by about 10%-- but there's no precedent for its use in humans, or if there have been trials in cousin drugs, the trials have not panned out for reasons that many say were merely statistical blips. but in the mice, it's a winner-- they die slower, and don't seem to suffer nearly as much. in some of the mouse models, it's an even bigger winner, and can be curative. and in a few of the mice, it doesn't seem to be effective at all, but this is a small minority-- let's say 5%.
which therapy does the pharma company push forward into clinical trials, and which does it shelve?
the answer is that neither are shelved, but the first therapy goes to the clinical pipeline first, which puts the second therapy at least a few years behind it before hitting the market, assuming it clears trials and the FDA, which it might not.
the risk of the superior treatment's failure is only tolerable by the pharmas if there's a recent success in hand.
this is why patients get shafted in the short run; their suffering is irrelevant to the risk of drug development as far as the pharma execs care.
the first drug will clear the clinical trial process more reliably, which means that it'll get busy treating patients faster, which means that it'll be a moneymaker faster-- even if its side effects make it a second or third line of treatment right out of the gate.
this leads to having a lot of shitty drugs that aren't very effective, but they're better than nothing, and they're probably better than what came before.
then, a few years later, we see the wonder cures. the wonder cures exist in the same therapy ecosystem as the shitty drugs, which now have a few more years of familiarity behind them.
there's one more wrinkle: the drug company doesn't want its drugs to be competing with each other. so the original shitty drug goes back to the mice and likely back to the clinical trials for a different use case, which it gets approval for-- viola, a "new drug" for cancer.
so the pharma companies save lives, often miraculously. as a former scientist, i am proud to have contributed to that.
but it is the nature of the pharma companies to serve humanity's purposes very poorly as a result of the financial incentives they face.