Welcome to the working week. We hope your weekend was pleasant and relaxing. Now, though, the routine has returned - deadlines and meetings beckon. To prepare, we are brewing the required cup of stimulation. So grab one yourself, or perhaps a bottle of water is preferred, and get ready for the plunge. Meanwhile, here are a few items to help you along. Have a great day, everyone...
Roche Suspends Rheumatoid Arthritis Drug Trial After Deaths (Reuters)
AstraZeneca's Colon Cancer Drug Fails Test (Bloomberg News)
Pfizer's Jeff Kindler Woos Ratiopharm (Reuters)
A 'Miracle' Cancer Drug At $48,000 (Bloomberg News)
Xenoport To Cut Staff By Half (San Jose Business Journal)
2 Comments
Good article on Miracle Cancer drugs.
GIST is a tough disease to fight, but I think it is still curable.
Additionally, it just dawned on me that they were treating people in cancer placebo trials with sugar pills. The absolute worst thing to do. Sugar goes right to the tumor and nourishes it, Anyone ever have a PET scan?
They need to switch from a sugar pill to something else...
Many people argue that why should we pay $48K for a drug that extends survival by only 29 days? These arguments inevitably boil down to quality of life. The argument goes "why should we give someone a better quality of life if it's only for a month. I reject this notion because the people asking the question are looking at the QOL from the perspective of a healthy person's QOL, NOT what even an incrementally improved QOL might mean to the terminally ill patient. It is impossible for healthy people to relate to this, and therefore I reject any and all attempts to tie reimbursements to PRESUMED quality of life and survival.
If you want a Biblical analogy, it is said in the Book of Genesis that God created the earth and it's creatures in six days. However, as was queried by the defense lawyer in the Scopes trial in an attempt to reconcile evolution with Creationism, how do we know that each "day" in the Bible was only a 24 hour day"? Why couldn't each "day" have been a billion years, since back then there were no devices to measure time.
By the same token, each "day" that we extend life with these drugs may only seem like a 24 hour day to us healthy individuals, but may seem much longer to the terminally ill patient.