Five HIV patients left 'virus-free' with no need for daily drugs in early vaccine trials - Polidicks

[QUOTE=ilikecorn;51866193]"big pharma" doesn't suppress things left and right, believe it or not. 9.99/10 times, a vaccine/treatment/gene looks really really good during early research, or even early trials, and then gets weeded out because it has some horrible side effect. It doesn't make sense to report failures because you'd see a new headline every day saying something similar to: "potential cancer drug actually makes cancer worse, company cancels it"[/QUOTE] To be fair a cancer drug that made cancer rapidly get worse would be an interesting headline

[QUOTE=Kylel999;51872990]To be fair a cancer drug that made cancer rapidly get worse would be an interesting headline[/QUOTE] After bombarding your own immune system with radioactive and chemical treatments would you be so shocked that it would spread cancer depending on its stage?

[QUOTE=ilikecorn;51868827]They do, Companies will occasionally fudge the numbers in order to get FDA approved, (since the FDA doesn't really test the drug, they just review the test data), However, the companies that do this, realize that the FDA could pull the drug at any time, assuming enough adverse events occur, and creation of said "bad" drugs opens the companies up to litigation. Severe enough litigation could prompt congressional oversight to step in.. which pharma companies don't want. So to keep people out of their business, they generally run a fairly clean (in terms of "don't make deadly drugs") business. Because being a shitbag while also making shit drugs, would probably make you end up poor, and in jail somewhere. In short: They do occasionally fudge the numbers, but not so severely that a stupidly deadly drug makes it out onto the market. They don't, however, cover up new drug discoveries. In the current market, you only make the big bucks if you come up with it first, and patent it. If a drug company found a cure for HIV, I would be willing to bet a paycheck that they wouldn't just tell everyone about it, they'd go through extreme measures to make sure that everyone and everything understood that "x" company killed HIV, the scourge of modern man, behold "x" company, since it can cure HIV, its other drugs must be EVEN BETTER than the competitions. See how that works? You're not thinking like a capitalist if you just sit back and think "oh, they'll hide a HIV/Cancer drug because treatment is more profitable than cure", because, quite frankly, you stand to make a significantly higher profit if you create the drug, market it well, and then position yourself in such a way that you paint your opponents as "look, they didn't create the cure, we did, look at our other lines of various drugs, you can clearly see that we are the superior pharma company, and therefore you should buy from us".[/QUOTE] Read it all, I know what you mean by all this, it makes sense. Whoever comes first, takes profit first. Can't disagree with that. Competition is high and there needs to be information secrecy. But on contrary, oil companies & gasoline vehicle companies didn't tried to make better electric vehicles. The companies were actually killing every opportunity that would make electric vehicles grow and make profit. It's short-term capitalistic thinking "If we kill electric now, we will still get profit from gasoline" vs long-term capitalistic thinking "If we invest big money in electric vehicles, we might make less profit at first but long term we could profit". So for pharma companies, it's better long-term to play 'almost' by the rules and make themselves look good by being first and doing good job, but short-term discovering new drug can render already-existing and very profitable drugs obsolete.

[QUOTE=Dolton;51868229]Do none of you conspiracy nuts really think not a single person would ever leak something if a cure for AIDs was really suppressed? How delusionally paranoid of corporations do you have to be to think that what would be one of the single largest medical developments in history is being so well suppressed that not one person has ever come forward about it?[/QUOTE] There's fucknuggets who're under the impression that Earth is actually flat and every scientist is just lying about it. Just saying.

[QUOTE=Fourier;51873030]Read it all, I know what you mean by all this, it makes sense. Whoever comes first, takes profit first. Can't disagree with that. Competition is high and there needs to be information secrecy. But on contrary, oil companies & gasoline vehicle companies didn't tried to make better electric vehicles. The companies were actually killing every opportunity that would make electric vehicles grow and make profit. It's short-term capitalistic thinking "If we kill electric now, we will still get profit from gasoline" vs long-term capitalistic thinking "If we invest big money in electric vehicles, we might make less profit at first but long term we could profit". So for pharma companies, it's better long-term to play 'almost' by the rules and make themselves look good by being first and doing good job, but short-term discovering new drug can render already-existing and very profitable drugs obsolete.[/QUOTE] The problem with this comparison is that it's easier to make a new engine than it is to make a new drug. People complain that the drug industry only makes marginal improvements over existing drugs. That's often true and the scray thing isn't that they're doing it deliberately. Marginal improvements are the best that they can do. I'm sure there have been countless times where someone has promised a cancer treatment that'll revolutionise the field but then find out that the improvements over the current standard of care to be barely statistically significant, if that at all. Nobody sets out to make drugs that are only slightly better. And many many many drug candidates don't even clear this bar.

[QUOTE=ilikecorn;51873437]The reason it's pretty hard to make significant improvements is because the human body has very tiny margins for error. It's strange, to think just how survivable we are, and then realize that a deviation in pH of ~.5 in either direction is enough to send you into a spiral that can cause death. New drugs are easy to make.. new drugs that don't kill you are very, very hard to make. Another thing to consider is that every drug is somewhat toxic to the human body, and safety thresholds are extremely real, and the FDA very rarely approves a drug with a very small safety threshold.[/QUOTE] That's why I abhor people who have no idea about science or why regulations are in place and buy the "bu bu bu muh free markets" stupid dogma and then go on ranting "Imagine how many diseases would be cured if we disbanded the FDA!" Uh, dude, the FDA is in there for a reason. Remember when people bought things with uranium...when quacks went on selling bottles saying they cured everything? As an additional observation: I used to think like that, I mean, people who study economics face the situation in that way "More costs = Bad for society, Less costs = Good for society", but then when you start researching how stuff actually works and why some scientists actually say "Hey dude, don't screw this up unless you want everybody to end up with cholera" you end up supporting and even calling for more things like the EPA, FDA and such.

[QUOTE=Adelle Zhu;51866165]I'm not usually a conspiracy follower but I really wouldn't be surprised if someone makes this go nowhere.[/QUOTE] See, this is the kind of thinking that makes Trump's whole "down with big regulation" rhetoric seem to make sense. You want stuff like this to come through much faster? Imagine having much worse side effects than we have now. Not to mention unforseen side effects, because we didn't test these drugs or vaccines enough. Drugs are dangerous, and the ways they interact with your body are so incredibly complex that it's virtually impossible to know exactly how it could negatively affect you in the short or long term without extensive testing. As said earlier, you don't hear about scrapped stuff unless it makes for good headlines, and even then hardly ever. Condensed general news reporting of scientific breakthroughs skims over the important details of these sort of things, which is why I wish early trial stuff like this would stick to scientific publications strictly until it gets closer to actually being realized in a practical sense.

[QUOTE=ilikecorn;51873437]The reason it's pretty hard to make significant improvements is because the human body has very tiny margins for error. It's strange, to think just how survivable we are, and then realize that a deviation in pH of ~.5 in either direction is enough to send you into a spiral that can cause death. New drugs are easy to make.. new drugs that don't kill you are very, very hard to make. Another thing to consider is that every drug is somewhat toxic to the human body, and safety thresholds are extremely real, and the FDA very rarely approves a drug with a very small safety threshold.[/QUOTE] It's kind of misleading to say 'new drugs are easy to make'. You can't call a molecule a drug until you've proven that it hits your target, doesn't hit anything else, and that hitting the target actually does something. Given the drug discovery and approval process, efficacy is a more difficult hurdle to clear than safety. Unsafe drugs are usually weeded out fairly early, through [i]in vitro[/i] screening, animal testing, and preclinical trials. The vast majority of drug candidates fail before ever getting to clinical trials, but because the time and money spent up to that point is fairly small it's not really an issue. The real time and money sinks are the Phase I-III clinical trials, which is where you prove that the drug actually does something. These take years and chew through hundreds of millions, and the failure rate is something like 90%.

[QUOTE=_Axel;51868168]There are a lot of other STDs than HIV.[/QUOTE] Very true, but a cure for HIV could quickly lead to cures for other retroviruses/DNA viruses like Herpes or Hepatitis though.

[QUOTE=Helix Snake;51866350]One time cures are not as profitable as lifetime treatment.[/QUOTE] Late reply but if they don't own the new treatment someone else is eventually gonna invent it and they won't get to cash in on it.