Reply to What happened to curing cancer or saving the world?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

My husband is a cancer researcher with an MD/PhD. I don't know why the PP associates that with Big Pharma - most research is publicly funded and at NIH or other similar institutions.

Since we're in that world, we know plenty of kids who want to be doctors and scientists.[/quote]That's just wrong.  The vast majority of drug funding is private, typically by industry, aka Big Pharma and investors.

You know who actually researches, develops and sells cancer drugs? Big pharma. And that's not a bad thing. It takes infrastructure to do the serious work of developing a new drug and getting it approved.  New drugs have global clinical trials in dozens of countries, supply chains across dozens of countries, and then get approval in every country across the globe.  Even research and development cuts across countries with different aspects being developed in different places, because companies go to the global experts leading cutting-edge science.  There's a lot of complexity.

Some early research is done in academic centers and at universities, but NIH is not selling medicines.  They are laying ground work, but there's still a ton of work to turn that into an actual medicine for patients.[/quote]

I think you seriously underestimate how much of the foundational work is done on NIH funding. It isn't just 'some early research.' It's ALL of the mechanistic details and generally most of the preclinical work too. Even when companies get involved with a research compound or clinical grade compound in-hand, they aren't doing that type of research themselves. They're either contracting out to CROs, or developing CRADAs with research institutions.

Don't get me wrong - I agree that pharma/industry invests incredible money to get drugs to market. But that relies on scientists to lay a firm foundation of why and how to use the drug. And when that step is skipped, pharma is also at risk.[/quote]
I'm a patent attorney with a PhD in chemistry and have spent years of my life reading lab notebooks chronicling the discovery of medicines.  Yes, there is work done in academic and government labs, but it's not even close to a majority.   Lots and lots of science on mechanisms and pathways is done in industry too.  Most oncology drug preclinical work is done by industry, with it being an exception if a drug makes it that far in a govt lab.

I'm 100% supportive of funding science and think that funding is critically important.  I just get really annoyed at the vilification of big pharma when they are making groundbreaking progress towards treating cancer more effectively, and hopefully finding cures.  If a young person wants to work on curing cancer, they should absolutely consider working in pharma.[/quote]

Sorry, didn't think I was villifying pharma. I'm a PI, and plenty of my students and postdocs go on to industry jobs and I actively support them in taking that path. It's possible that we're talking about two different things here: the discovery of medicine (the actual drug that goes into patients) is very different that the solid rationale for making and delivering that drug. We need the latter to take place before pharma will invest in the former. One takes place predominantly in industry (with a few notable chemistry laboratories, see: Ras-targeting drugs), and the other predominantly takes place in basic research centers. This is not a controversial take at all. [/quote]
I think you're underestimating how much mechanistic work is done in industry.  For instance, PD-1 was discovered at Kyoto University, but they had no idea what it did.  PD-L1/B7-H4 was discovered at Harvard and found to be expressed on cancer cells.  But the mechanistic work (i.e., PD-1 binding to PD-L1 and the effect of blocking that interaction) was done by Genetics Institute/Wyeth/Pfizer, Cambridge Antibody Technology/AstraZeneca, Ono Pharma/BMS, and Organon/Merck.  That's why we have I/O therapies today.  Very little beyond the discovery of the receptor and ligand was done by academics.

In addition to the primary mechanism work, industry also ends up doing lots of work to understand off target effects and other metabolic and drug localization mechanisms.[/quote]

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