MetaFilter posts tagged with pharma

Even better than the real thing?

fiercecupcake — Sat, 18 May 2013 11:32:15 -0800

Widespread fraud has been discovered in the case of an Indian generic drug manufacturer that makes generic Lipitor (atorvastatin calcium) and many other drugs. Ranbaxy has "pleaded guilty to seven federal criminal counts of selling adulterated drugs with intent to defraud." Many people rely on generic drugs to be able to afford drug therapy. The basic principle of generics is based on bioequivalence, but do all generics provide comparable levels of bioavailability to their brand-name counterparts? Besides Ranbaxy and Lipitor, other widely used generics from different companies have been affected lately: generic Seroquel (quetiapine fumarate), an atypical antipsychotic, generic Wellbutrin (buproprion), an atypical antidepressant, and birth control pills. Here is an FDA listing of currently authorized generic drugs.

We are powerless buyers in a sellers’ market

zarq — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 08:12:48 -0800

Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us. Summary: Inside the Cover Story. Related video: The Exorbitant Prices of Health Care Time is soliciting reader stories about their experience with the high cost of US healthcare. CNN has been investigating the story with the magazine. Comments on the article.

"medicine is broken" - Ben Goldacre, co-founder of AllTrials

greenish — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 14:06:52 -0800

Ben Goldacre has been talked about here before. This year, following on from his book Bad Pharma - where he described a culture of badly-done medical trials on unsuitable subjects (sometimes with horrific but, tragically, potentially preventable outcomes), where swathes of results that don't reflect well on the drug in question go unpublished and even, in some cases, hidden - he has co-founded the project AllTrials, which campaigns for all medical trials to be recorded and reported. Goldacre claims that reporting all trials that take place would mean that corporations can no longer skew published results in their favour by hiding away the less favourable ones. This means that the drugs which come to market and are prescribed most often are the best possible ones for the job. But what about competition? Surely there's a market for variety and some kinds might be better than others? Yes, but if a company tells a doctor that their drug is the best, when it cures 6/10 people, and another drug is available that cures 8/10 - then the doctor who is swayed by false results could be missing an opportunity to cure two more people out of every ten. Furthermore, missing data can lead to potentially crucial data not being published, such as the desperately sad case of a new anti-arrhythmic drug, which was prescribed to people who had had a heart attack as a preventative measure for further attacks. "well over 100,000 people died unnecessarily before it was realised that the fine balance between benefit and risk was completely different for patients without a proven abnormal heart rhythm." (quote taken from excerpt lower down page). This could have been prevented if a 1980 study reporting the issue, although writing it off at the time as an anomaly, had been published. It was subsequently published "with a mea culpa, realising the harm that had been done by not publishing it sooner" but sadly, the damage had been done.

Psychotropic medication efficacy and publication bias

OmieWise — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 05:47:55 -0800

Antipsychotics: "The magnitude of publication bias found for antipsychotics was less than that found previously for antidepressants, possibly because antipsychotics demonstrate superiority to placebo more consistently."
Antidepressants: "We found a bias toward the publication of positive results. Not only were positive results more likely to be published, but studies that were not positive, in our opinion, were often published in a way that conveyed a positive outcome. [...] Using both approaches, we found that the efficacy of this drug class is less than would be gleaned from an examination of the published literature alone. According to the published literature, the results of nearly all of the trials of antidepressants were positive. In contrast, FDA analysis of the trial data showed that roughly half of the trials had positive results." Previously Previous news about antipsychotic efficacy from the Clinical Antipsychotic Trials of Intervention Effectiveness (CATIE) study.

Avastin and the power of hope

metaBugs — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 03:49:51 -0800

Based on a lack of evidence for efficacy, "an FDA panel unanimously voted to revoke its approval of Avastin (bevacizumab) for breast cancer. The decision evoked cheers from some groups and jeers from others. At least one group derided the decision as the work of a 'death panel'". An interesting article on the withdrawal of a "miracle" drug from a section of the market, explaining the reasoning behind the decision and discussing the reaction from patients, many of whom believe -- despite the evidence -- that the drug was actually helping them. I thought that the New England Journal of Medicine "Perspectives" article linked from the post is particularly interesting, although I'm not sure how clear it'll be for non-biomed people.

Who would have ever thought that Gila monster saliva would be a good place to look for a type 2 diabetes drug?

Blasdelb — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 15:02:10 -0800

Improving Peptides: Small firms develop better peptide drug candidates to expand this pharmaceutical class and attract big pharma partners

master of information

kliuless — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 11:00:18 -0800

The New Biology - Eric Schadt's quest to upend molecular biology and open source it. (via)

Cancer

homunculus — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 12:52:19 -0800

Cheap, safe drug kills most cancers. That's the good news. The bad news is that because there's no patent and it's so cheap to make, researchers may not be able to get funding from the private sector for further research since the treatment wouldn't make a profit. [Via Hullabaloo.]

Rare reaction to new drug during trial.

piscatorius — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 18:11:52 -0800

Newsfilter: The trial of a new drug to treat rheumatoid arthritis and leukaemia goes horribly wrong. 6 normally healthy volunteers have a freak reaction to the drug resulting in multiple organ failure. All 6 men are in intensive care. 4 are seriously ill while 2 remain in a critical condition. An eyewitness, fortunate to have taken only a placebo recalls the nightmare as the men around him begin to fall ill.

Race-based pharmaceuticals?

Rothko — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 19:36:47 -0800

Pharmaceutical company seeks approval for controversial heart drug BiDil for blacks only, even though the connection of a nitric oxide deficiency to the genetic makeup of the African-American population is an unsubstantiated hunch, in the words of the drug's own developer — and the drug had already once been denied approval. Is the FDA doing good science or ignoring science under the pressure of big business wanting to sell BiDil to a US$1Bln demographic?

2004 Captured in Song

debralee — Thu, 18 Nov 2004 04:43:29 -0800

Underwear Goes Inside The Pants (video) is a nice little ditty about the condition of the world in 2004.

A major advance in genetically modified foods.

Steven Den Beste — Mon, 30 Jul 2001 13:28:13 -0800

A major advance in genetically modified foods. Developed with government funding, and intended eventually to be given away to farmers, there has been a major success in the use of salt water to irrigate crops. They've developed a tomato which grows fine in salt water or on salty soil. Thousands of lives will be saved in parts of the world where fresh water for irrigation is scarce, including up to one third of the arable land in India where salt has been accumulating. Interestingly, these tomatoes are so good at what they do that they remove salt from the soil, improving it. The genetic modification which was done to these tomatoes should be possible with many other crops, including especially rice (on which major effort in Egypt is underway now).

gimli — Fri, 30 Mar 2001 15:19:09 -0800

Monsanto wins case against Canadian farmer. Percy Schmeiser, who has attained folk-hero status, was held liable for growing genetically modified canola without paying the royalty. The decision in a federal court in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, was a significant setback for farmers who fear they will be held liable if pollen from neighboring farms blows onto their fields, transmitting patented genes to their crops without their knowledge or consent.

"GMO free" labelling set to become illegal in the US?

holgate — Thu, 18 Jan 2001 19:17:54 -0800

"GMO free" labelling set to become illegal in the US? "The U.S. regulatory system is a model around the world because it is grounded in science, not superstition or uninformed emotion." So says the president of a biotech lobby group. Ahem.

Concerned About Frankenfood?

snakey — Mon, 08 Jan 2001 16:10:45 -0800

Concerned About Frankenfood? Ralph Nader has some ideas.