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

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[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]

PP you replied to. OK, let's back up.

You're confusing "scientific research" and "drug development", two very different branches of activity.

Scientific research is the term usually reserved for fundamental research, the kind that's done first in an open-ended way, and usually funded by governments, since it has a high likelihood of not leading to rapid medical progress, but a very good chance of increasing human knowledge. [b]I am in that sphere, and I can guarantee that when people say "scientific research", it means mostly the kind that NIH and universities do. This is where scientists and physicians study cancers, degenerative diseases, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, etc[/b]!

The pharmaceutical level of work is way, way, downstream, PP. It's a completely different, closed-end approach - they want to develop a specific product, and pour billions into finding molecules that can operate on the desired target. Again, something I know well.

Please don't weigh in on something you only vaguely understand.

[/quote]

100% this. [/quote]

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