Stem Cell Research is a GO

Notice they have announce an improvement in financial aid to $120 million. Was a lot of criticism for their paltry amount of financial aid with the huge endowment monies. $120 million is still chump change.

They went along with the proposition writers. Who happen to be the same ones who get the money and get to patent any finds and make money from same. Not even pay back the taxpayers for funding them. Pretty nice to have the taxpayers be the venture capitalists and not have to give them any ownership. You want to give me all your money and I will try to create business with it? If the business fails, you lose your money. If the business succeeds you lose your money. Why not get the cure and help the state stay out of bankruptcy? And you do not seem to be very smart if you ask me.

Cites? :>)

I didnt see any mention of patent portfolios.

I think your figures are misleading, Bill. University researchers develop a chemical, and if it has potential as a drug, a drug company will license it or buy it and develop it into a drug for humans. In terms of the chemistry I wouldn't disagree -- the university researchers often create the active agent (I forget what percentage it is of new drugs, but it's significant) -- but that usually requires further lab work to make it a safe and effective drug.

What's misleading is the implication in your statement about where the work and money goes. I don't recall the figures but this is the order of magnitude: the chemical typically costs 10% or so of the cost to bring a drug to market; pre-approval marketing may be 30%; and most of the balance is in clinical testing done by the pharma company, at their own risk.

This is the last drug I worked on when I was in the industry:

Sanofi Aventis had, IIRC, around $300 million sunk into the drug when the FDA decided not to approve it. Of that, the figure I heard was that something like $10 million - $20 million was the cost of acquiring the chemical. Around $110 million was spent on marketing (in Europe) and pre-approval marketing in the US. The rest was refinement of the chemical and clinical trials, and, at the time of disapproval, two enormous, worldwide clinical trials were underway, which dwarfed the sized and cost of the ones that had been done to that point.

More crucial than specific drugs is the work university research departments do in the basic science of pharmacology. If they don't do it, nobody else will, and that's where the ideas for new drugs come from. Those labs make some money by developing specific products that may become drugs, but the outside funding is necessary for the basic research.

I don't underestimate the value of those university research labs -- they're the cornerstone of the whole thing -- but they are not the ones spending the really big bucks in drug development.

-- Ed Huntress

But when they were blastocysts and candidates for stem-cell research, you couldn't tell them apart from a garden slug or a macaw.

Do you understand this?

-- Ed Huntress

That's true, and it may be annoying, but the political deal was that it would reduce the cost of federal funding for those research centers. It was one of those back-door deals to reduce government spending.

Increases to NIH funding ran at the rate of 14% - 15%/year for years before

2004. Then it was reduced to 2%/year. In 2007, NIH got their first actual *cut* in funding.

I'm sure there's more to it but those cuts were the objective of the whole deal.

-- Ed Huntress

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Actually, I don't. Thank you for asking.

I suspect you're being coy about this but just in case...

At the point at which they're used for stem-cell extraction and research, the blastocycsts of most creatures look identical -- and have the same degree of sentience, which is to say, none at all.

So the conflict is strictly a religious one, not a scientific one. That's not to dismiss the religious point of view, only to identify where all of this conflict comes from. This, too, I suspect you know. Right?

-- Ed Huntress

Of course, Bush had to pay for his wars even at the cost of Americans not receiving health care. Good demonstration of Bush/Cheney priorities.

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Ed, since they look identical why aren't you using the tapeworm and parakeet blastocysts?

Actually, its not. Its a scientific one.

It sure was meant too, though.

The science and the conflict comes in where you say that they look identical to all manner of things but then you can't use all manner of things in your research, right? You have to use actual human tissue, no?

So when O'bama allows government money to be spent violating the nuremburg medical code of ethics (post nazi germany) and on trade in human tissue and trafficing, will Mudge and Winston shout for his execution?

Do you think that octuplet gal in California is merely farming tissue for sale to the researchers?

Wrong DNA.

Tell us about that.

Each of us weighs the measures of value differently. I have mine, but I'm not denigrating others. I'd rather help clear up the scientific issue, however, than to be one of the propagandists who intentionally try to cloud it.

Right. Human tissue.

Which provision of the Nuremburg Code do you think has been violated? Article One, or Article Five?

I don't know; I rarely speculate; and I almost never guess.

Again, I'll be interested to hear what you have to say about this being a scientific issue. It appears you're questioning on the basis of an ethical or political issue, not a scientific one.

-- Ed Huntress

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The 300 mill for clinical is a big cost, but the basis for the chemical and the treatment came out of a university most times. So the chemical company takes it the extra 10%, which may cost more than 10% of the money and gets a patent on it. I worked on biomechanical systems. RF treatment of collagen, and we went off others work, added extra complexity to the system to avoid patent infringement. And then hurt a couple women during clincals. some because of bad training, and a couple because the management would not accept some concerns and change the physical design. Not my part that failed, as I was the electronic / embedded software guy. Of the $35 million burned by the company, a lot was saved by leveraging prior arts.

Yeah, it was a big one -- Wall Street was predicting that rimonabant was going to be a $3.5 billion/yr. blockbuster in the US, and the FDA was especially picky for a couple of reasons. But the order of magnitude of those costs is quite common with major new drugs.

I don't know where the basic work on the chemical was done -- I suspect university labs, because it has a completely novel mechanism of action and it was based on some deep, basic-science research with newly discovered metabolic processes.

I think we discussed your work before, and we said then that the relationship of costs, and the relative work that went on in university research versus private companies was somewhat different for devices than it is for drugs. With drugs, the big money is in the clinical trials, which only Big Pharma can afford today.

And a drug like rimonabant (brand name Acomplia in Europe) often needs further work to make it safe and/or effective. Nevertheless, the university work, as I said, underpins the whole process of new-drug discovery.

-- Ed Huntress

Hmmm, we cover the same profession. I've done a number of medical products. The last was the electronics which attached to a drip line and periodically sucked some fluid from the patient for testing then returned the sample to the patient via the same drip line. Our chemists had a polymer which could be doped to react to a broad range of chemicals and hormones.

In this case we were testing for lactic acid to determine the state of patient distress in real time. Prior technology required a mass spectrometer which was anything but real time. Before that I did the electronics for inhalation therapy and long ago I did physiological patient monitors. And lots of embedded system projects before, in between, and a after until I closed my consulting business.

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om...

So not identical. Not even close. Science has answered the question.

Ed Huntress is a LIAR! He does not represent trhuthfully! LIAR!