well its still chemical medicine, but right about now any fight is a good fight... ----- Original Message ----- From: Bob Molloy To: Biofuel@sustainablelists.org Sent: Tuesday, January 16, 2007 8:05 PM Subject: [Biofuel] Shakeup for Big Pharm
Hi All,
Something to ponder, a helluva shakeup for Big Pharm.
Regards,
Bob.
Medical Breakthrough Could Change Global Politics
By Chris Floyd
t r u t h o u t | UK Correspondent
Tuesday 16 January 2007
I. The Biochemistry of Hope
More war in Iraq. A new front in Somalia. Ships, troops and
planes lurking on the borders of Iran. Every day seems to deepen the shadow
over the dark valley of our times. Driven by a reckless regime in Washington
and the increasingly strident reaction it provokes, and by growing financial
and social inequities stranding billions of people in poverty and despair, the
geopolitical scene appears locked in a cycle of conflict and chaos that nothing
can break.
But a quiet announcement at London's Hammersmith Hospital at the
turning of the new year heralded a breakthrough that has the potential to be
one of the most transformative developments ever seen in global affairs: a
positive change on a par with - or even surpassing - the world-altering
malignancies of war, greed and strife. But this boon could be strangled in its
cradle by the vast corporate interests threatened by its radical new approach
to both health care and business.
The approach is called "ethical pharmaceuticals," and it was
unveiled on January 2 by Sunil Shaunak, professor of infectious diseases at
Imperial College, and Steve Brocchini of the London School of Pharmacy, the
Guardian reports. Their team of scientists in India and the UK, financed by the
prestigious Wellcome with technical assistance from the UK government, have
developed a method of making small but significant changes to the molecular
structure of existing drugs, thereby transforming them into new products,
circumventing the long-term patents used by the corporate giants of Big Pharma
to keep prices - and profits - high. This will give the world's poorest and
most vulnerable people access to life-saving medicines - now priced out of
reach - for mere pennies.
But the breakthrough is not merely biochemical. Shaunak's team is
proposing a new model for the pharmaceutical business. The patent of the
transformed drug they have developed is held by non-profit Imperial University.
And because their methods are hundreds of millions dollars cheaper than the
mammoth development costs of the big pharmaceutical companies - whose spending
on marketing and advertising often dwarfs their funding of scientific research
- Shaunak and his colleagues can market their vital medicines for infectious
diseases at near-giveaway levels, yet still stay in business. How so? By
foregoing the profit motive as the ultimate value of their work.
"People in academic medicine have a choice," Shaunak told an
Imperial College journal. "They can use their ideas and creativity to make
large sums of money for small numbers of people, or they can look outwards to
the global community and make affordable treatments for common diseases."
The first drug developed by the team is a new version of
interferon, the main treatment for Hepatitis C, a debilitating disease that
afflicts 200 million people worldwide. Yet only 30 million can afford the
medicine. That leaves the rest to face the chronic liver disease and premature
death that the illness inflicts. The cost of Hepatitis C treatment in the UK is
approximately $13,000 per patient per year, New Scientist reports. Nor can a
cheaper version of the existing interferon be made, because Big Pharma players
Hoffman-La Roche and Schering Plough hold patents not only on the drug but also
on the standard way of adding the special molecules needed to enhance its
performance.
So Shaunak and Brocchini invented a new way attaching the
molecules - from the inside, not the outside - that went around the patent
restrictions and produced a medicine that "appears to be as effective as the
existing product," according to Nature, the leading scientific journal. Their
novel methods could also be adapted to extend the effectiveness of "drugs for
other conditions such as HIV," at a fraction of current costs, Shaunak told New
Scientist. Big Pharma says it costs an average of $800 million to create a new
drug; but without the need to produce ever-expanding profits for shareholders
or use glitzy ad campaigns to push their pills - or lay out the vast political
patronage that Big Pharma dispenses each year to keep its favored politicians
sweet - Shaunak says his team can now develop essential medicines for only a
few million dollars each.
In fact, while their Hepatitis C medicine undergoes
government-funded clinical trials in India, Shaunak and Brocchini have been
asked by Médecins Sans Frontières to work on treatments for another ailment:
Leishmaniasis, a parasitical disease also known as black fever. It "occurs in
the poorer parts of the world: India, around the Mediterranean, South America,
Sudan," Shaunak told Spero News. "Again, there is a treatment that cures the
disease but in places like Bihar, India, the cost of the drug is 80 percent of
a person's annual income. What we are going to do is make a version of the drug
which will be stable in hot climates and which will cost about 10 percent of
the price of the existing medicine."
The potential benefits and geopolitical implications of this
approach are almost limitless. Imagine a world where the most downtrodden can
be rescued from the ravages of chronic disease that now beset them, generation
after generation. A world where they don't droop and languish, where their
energies are not consumed and exhausted in the struggle for survival. A world
where their children are born to healthy mothers, with all the proven
advantages for future development, both physically and mentally, that such a
birth provides. Imagine a world where the preventable deaths and epidemics that
break down societal bonds, devastate communities, cripple local economies,
destroy families and make any kind of political action almost impossible are a
thing of the past. Whole new polities, new movements, new philosophies, new
centers of power would be created as the majority of humanity - the untold
multitudes who simply "don't matter" now, who live and die on the ragged
margins, in the mega-slums and shattered villages, the industrial wastelands
and war-scarred regions - are finally liberated from the tyranny of chronic
disease. Imagine the kind of politics that could emerge from millions of
long-forgotten people suddenly given more strength, more longevity, more time
and energy to seek political change and redress of grievances rather than
merely fighting to stay alive.
It would be the political, social and cultural equivalent of the
discovery of the "New World," which transformed global affairs forever. Only
this time, the "natives" would be healed and empowered by the encounter, not
decimated and marginalized by disease and dispossession.
We're not speaking here of "miracle cures" for all ailments, but
simply of access to the kind of basic health care that is considered normal in
the developed world. Of course, millions in these more privileged countries
also suffer needless debilitation from the firewall of profit and price that
surrounds so many medical advances. And here too, "ethical pharmaceuticals"
could also have a large political effect. Once the drugs pass medical trials in
India and elsewhere, they can be sold in many nations in the developed world.
Britain's National Health Service, for example, would be able to use the
Shaunak-Brocchini treatment for Hepatitis C, saving tens of millions of dollars
for the public health service every year: money that could then be used for
treating other diseases, for preventive care, for improving facilities - a
virtuous circle rippling outward through society.
II. Pushbacks and Politics
Of course, the American people would doubtless be "protected"
from such radical virtue by its benevolent government, which even now shields
them from the menace of "unsafe" low-cost prescription drugs from Canada. (For
as we all know, al Qaeda has thoroughly infiltrated Canada's commie-style
health care system and is hoping to flood the Homeland with polonium-laced
heart pills and exploding suppositories from Montreal and Saskatoon.) A strong
bipartisan consensus in Washington has long fought off the importation of
dubious nostrums from devilish foreigners. And although this tender concern for
the wellbeing of the American people has never quite extended to actually
providing them with guaranteed health care, it has - no doubt coincidentally -
done wonders for the coffers of the major pharmaceutical companies, who have
reciprocated by showering their largesse on these dedicated public officials.
The power of this relationship has just been demonstrated once
again on Capitol Hill, as the Washington Post noted on Friday. The
newly-empowered Democratic majority in Congress has scaled back its once-bold
plans to overhaul George W. Bush's disastrous Medicare drug program, which
bollixed the medical care of millions of Americans but has proven to be a
bonanza for Big Pharma. (As well it should, seeing how pharmaceutical lobbyists
wrote most of the bill.) Now, instead of their original plan to create a
federal prescription-drug program that would genuinely benefit the majority of
the populace, the Democrats are offering an anemic measure that would require
the government to use its buying power to negotiate lower drug prices for
Medicare patients. Even this would be an improvement over the current
boondoggle, but it is of course foredoomed to failure: Bush has already
promised to veto it, and the Democrats are unlikely to muster enough votes to
override his rejection.
That's because, as the Post reports, "drug firms and their trade
groups have been transforming their Washington operations by hiring top
Democratic lobbyists to gain access to new committee chairmen, bolstering
Democratic political donations and spending millions on public relations
campaigns to overcome an image, indicated in recent surveys, that the industry
puts profits ahead of patients." (More money that could have been spent on
developing cheaper cures for, say, Hepatitis C or Leishmaniasis.)
In fact, Big Pharma has laid out more loot for American
politicians "than any other industry between 1998 and 2005 - more than $900
million," the Post reports. For that amount of money, the Shaunak-Brocchini
method could have produced some 90 new low-cost treatments for deadly
infectious diseases around the world.
With this kind of political muscle behind it, Big Pharma will be
well-placed to launch its inevitable push-back against ethical pharmaceuticals.
They are already limbering up the legal artillery for possible patent
infringement suits against the Shaunak team - although the latter, through
Imperial College, has also procured some big legal guns to protect the process,
including top lawyers who have worked for Big Pharma itself, the Guardian
reports. With press releases and pro-industry articles from friendly
journalists in conservative UK papers, the corporations are also mounting a PR
campaign against the new drug development method, and defending their huge
profit margins as essential for continuing the industry's service to humanity.
And it's true that the drugs developed by major pharmaceutical
firms have been of tremendous service to humanity over the years. Of course,
most of the time these benefits have gone to that portion of humanity that can
afford to pay for them, but not always. In the case of some high-profile
diseases, like AIDS, the industry has - often belatedly, sometimes reluctantly
and sometimes with genuine altruism - provided some treatments at low cost, or
even no cost.
The irony is that Shaunak - who with his colleagues is now in the
cross-hairs of Big Pharma - cheerfully acknowledges the industry's good works,
and doesn't see his own researches as a threat. As he noted to Spero News, his
team is focused on providing medicines for people who are getting no treatment
at all. The drug companies are not making any money from these sufferers;
therefore they won't lose money if someone else provides help for them. "These
patients are simply getting no treatment because the medicines are so
expensive," he said. "As somebody working within a university, I have a mission
statement [to] try to make drugs available for patients who currently have no
treatment at all. So in many ways our approach is complementary and not
competitive to the big pharmaceutical approaches."
Complementary in many ways, yes, but not in all; for there's no
doubt that as ethical pharmaceuticals seep from the desolate areas of the earth
where Big Pharma can mine no medical gold into the developed nations, it will
erode the industry's towering profit margins. The drug companies will have to
learn to live within somewhat more modest means - perhaps shaving a bit from
the multimillion-dollar compensation packages of its executives - or else shell
out even more around the world for the kind of political protection it now buys
in Washington. Either way, even here, in this very modest beginning, the new
political and financial power of the world's forgotten multitudes will begin to
make itself felt.
Of course it may well be that the development of ethical
pharmaceuticals, like most human endeavors, will not achieve its full
potential. It may well be that powerful forces will combine to kill or cripple
it. But for now at least, it stands as a reminder that in the course of human
events, the ultimate ends are always unknown. Cycles, systems, patterns of
behavior and immense structures of power that seem so fixed and immutable today
will be swept away tomorrow, in ways that we cannot begin to fathom. In dark
days that seem locked in a glide-path to disaster, these glimmers of
possibility can perhaps offer some measure of hope.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Chris Floyd is an American journalist. His weekly political
column, "Global Eye," ran in the Moscow Times from 1996 to 2006. His work has
appeared in print and online in venues all over the world, including The
Nation, Counterpunch, Columbia Journalism Review, the Christian Science
Monitor, Il Manifesto, the Bergen Record and many others. His story on Pentagon
plans to foment terrorism won a Project Censored award in 2003. He is the
author of Empire Burlesque: High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium,
and is co-founder and editor of the "Empire Burlesque" political blog.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
Biofuel mailing list
Biofuel@sustainablelists.org
http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org
Biofuel at Journey to Forever:
http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html
Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages):
http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
No virus found in this incoming message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.5.431 / Virus Database: 268.16.13/632 - Release Date: 1/16/2007
4:36 PM
2.ClrSpc.indent_2.gif
Description: GIF image
No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.431 / Virus Database: 268.16.13/632 - Release Date: 1/16/2007 4:36 PM
_______________________________________________ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
