#pharma drugs

[mediblogs-blog]

Carboxymethylcellulose 1% with SOC Eye Drops

Dry eyes, irritation, and discomfort are common problems affecting people of all ages, often caused by prolonged screen time, environmental factors, or medical conditions. Carboxymethylcellulose (CMC) 1% with SOC Eye Drops is a widely used solution for alleviating these symptoms. Known for its lubricating and protective properties, this formulation has become a go-to treatment for many ophthalmologists and patients alike.

[reasonsforhope]

"The Biden Administration last week [early December, 2023] announced it would be seizing patents for drugs and drug manufacturing procedures developed using government money.

A draft of the new law, seen by Reuters, said that the government will consider various factors including whether a medical situation is leading to increased prices of the drug at any given time, or whether only a small section of Americans can afford it.

The new executive order is the first exercise in what is called “march-in-rights” which allows relevant government agencies to redistribute patents if they were generated under government funding. The NIH has long maintained march-in-rights, but previous directors have been unwilling to use them, fearing consequences.

“We’ll make it clear that when drug companies won’t sell taxpayer funded drugs at reasonable prices, we will be prepared to allow other companies to provide those drugs for less,” White House adviser Lael Brainard said on a press call.

But just how much taxpayer money is going toward funding drugs? A research paper from the Insitute for New Economic Thought showed that “NIH funding contributed to research associated with every new drug approved from 2010-2019, totaling $230 billion.”

The authors of the paper continue, writing “NIH funding also produced 22 thousand patents, which provided marketing exclusivity for 27 (8.6%) of the drugs approved [between] 2010-2019.”

How we do drug discovery and production in America has a number of fundamental flaws that have created problems in the health service industry.

It costs billions of dollars and sometimes as many as 5 to 10 years to bring a drug to market in the US, which means that only companies with massive financial muscle can do so with any regularity, and that smaller, more innovative companies can’t compete with these pharma giants.

This also means that if a company can’t recoup that loss, a single failed drug can result in massive disruptions to business. To protect themselves, pharmaceutical companies establish piles of patents on drugs and drug manufacturing procedures. Especially if the drug in question treats a rare or obscure disease, these patents essentially ensure the company has monoselective pricing regimes.

However, if a company can convince the NIH that a particular drug should be considered a public health priority, they can be almost entirely funded by the government, as the research paper showed.

Some market participants, in this case the famous billionaire investor Mark Cuban, have attempted to remedy the issue of drug costs in America by manufacturing generic versions of patented drugs sold for common diseases."

-via Good News Network, December 11, 2023

[reality-detective]

Millions of children have been prescribed an asthma drug that causes suicidal thoughts, hallucinations, and other devastating psychiatric conditions.

Montelukast, marketed as Singulair, directly targets cells in the brain responsible for mood regulation, decision-making, impulse control, attention, and sleep—wreaking havoc on young minds.

The most enraging part? This has been known since 2008, yet nothing was done to protect children.

This video from 2008 reveals the FDA did nothing for 16 years. 🤔

[capitalism-is-parasitism]

This is sick

And if your doctor prescribes Paxlovid to reduce severity of symptoms, which Dr. Schaffner hopes is the case if you are older or have underlying health conditions that increase your risk for severe disease if you get COVID-19, your health insurer may charge a copay. Previously the federal government provided the drug for free regardless of insurance status.

If you need assistance to afford Paxlovid, you might want to contact Pfizer’s assistance program or call Pfizer at 877-219-7225.

[aunti-christ-ine]

I remember so clearly how we NEVER saw television commercials for prescription medicine. Unheard of!

Then, in the late 1980's, direct-to-consumer prescription drug advertising became completely legal — but in only New Zealand and the United States — nowhere else on Earth.

Now Big Pharma spends more on marketing than they do on research, mainly because most of the basic research has already been funded by federal grants — i.e., taxpayers (you and me).

So next time you see a prescription drug commercial on TV, remember that YOU are paying (through our taxes) for the ad's creation and airing.

Then, on top of that, we are personally shelling out ridiculous bankruptcy-causing dollars for the medicine itself — many, many times the cost of the actual drugs — to pay for their commercials.

Thanks to Bush, Reagan, and Republicans! 🤬

( sickening. )

[politijohn]

Source

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Uncle Sam paid to develop a cancer drug and now one guy will get to charge whatever he wants for it

Today (Oct 19), I'm in Charleston, WV to give the 41st annual McCreight Lecture in the Humanities. Tomorrow (Oct 20), I'm at Charleston's Taylor Books from 12h-14h.

The argument for pharma patents: making new medicines is expensive, and medicines are how we save ourselves from cancer and other diseases. Therefore, we will award government-backed monopolies – patents – to pharma companies so they will have an incentive to invest their shareholders' capital in research.

There's plenty wrong with this argument. For one thing, pharma companies use their monopoly winnings to sell drugs, not invent drugs. For every dollar pharma spends on research, it spends three dollars on marketing:

https://www.bu.edu/sph/files/2015/05/Pharmaceutical-Marketing-and-Research-Spending-APHA-21-Oct-01.pdf

And that "R&D" isn't what you're thinking of, either. Most R&D spending goes to "evergreening" – coming up with minor variations on existing drugs in a bid to extend those patents for years or decades:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3680578/

Evergreening got a lot of attention recently when John Green rained down righteous fire upon Johnson & Johnson for their sneaky tricks to prevent poor people from accessing affordable TB meds, prompting this excellent explainer from the Arm and A Leg Podcast:

https://armandalegshow.com/episode/john-green-part-1/

Another thing those monopoly profits are useful for: "pay for delay," where pharma companies bribe generic manufacturers not to make cheap versions of drugs whose patents have expired. Sure, it's illegal, but that doesn't stop 'em:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/competition-enforcement/pay-delay

But it's their money, right? If they want to spend it on bribes or evergreening or marketing, at least some of that money is going into drugs that'll keep you and the people you love from enduring unimaginable pain or dying slowly and hard. Surely that warrants a patent.

Let's say it does. But what about when a pharma company gets a patent on a life-saving drug that the public paid to develop, test and refine? Publicly funded work is presumptively in the public domain, from NASA R&D to the photos that park rangers shoot of our national parks. The public pays to produce this work, so it should belong to the public, right?

That was the deal – until Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980. Under Bayh-Dole, government-funded inventions are given away – to for-profit corporations, who get to charge us whatever they want to access the things we paid to make. The basis for this is a racist hoax called "The Tragedy Of the Commons," written by the eugenicist white supremacist Garrett Hardin and published by Science in 1968:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/01/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-how-ecofascism-was-smuggled-into-mainstream-thought/

Hardin invented an imaginary history in which "commons" – things owned and shared by a community – are inevitably overrun by selfish assholes, a fact that prompts nice people to also overrun these commons, so as to get some value out of them before they are gobbled up by people who read Garrett Hardin essays.

Hardin asserted this as a historical fact, but he cited no instances in which it happened. But when the Nobel-winning Elinor Ostrom actually went and looked at how commons are managed, she found that they are robust and stable over long time periods, and are a supremely efficient way of managing resources:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/04/analytical-democratic-theory/#epistocratic-delusions

The reason Hardin invented an imaginary history of tragic commons was to justify enclosure: moving things that the public owned and used freely into private ownership. Or, to put it more bluntly, Hardin invented a pseudoscientific justification for giving away parks, roads and schools to rich people and letting them charge us to use them.

To arrive at this fantasy, Hardin deployed one of the most important analytical tools of modern economics: introspection. As Ely Devons put it: "If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’"

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse

Hardin's hoax swept from the fringes to the center and became received wisdom – so much so that by 1980, Senators Birch Bayh and Bob Dole were able to pass a law that gave away publicly funded medicine to private firms, because otherwise these inventions would be "overgrazed" by greedy people, denying the public access to livesaving drugs.

On September 21, the NIH quietly published an announcement of one of these pharmaceutical transfers, buried in a list of 31 patent assignments in the Federal Register:

https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2023-20487.pdf

The transfer in question is a patent for using T-cell receptors (TCRs) to treat solid tumors from HPV, one of the only patents for treating solid tumors with TCRs. The beneficiary of this transfer is Scarlet TCR, a Delaware company with no website or SEC filings and ownership shrouded in mystery:

https://www.bizapedia.com/de/scarlet-tcr-inc.html

One person who pays attention to this sort of thing is James Love, co-founder of Knowledge Ecology International, a nonprofit that has worked for decades for access to medicines. Love sleuthed out at least one person behind Scarlet TCR: Christian Hinrichs, a researcher at Rutgers who used to work at the NIH's National Cancer Institute:

https://www.nih.gov/research-training/lasker-clinical-research-scholars/tenured-former-scholars

Love presumes Hinrichs is the owner of Scarlet TCR, but neither the NIH nor Scarlet TCR nor Hinrichs will confirm it. Hinrichs was one of the publicly-funded researchers who worked on the new TCR therapy, for which he received a salary.

This new drug was paid for out of the public purse. The basic R&D – salaries for Hinrichs and his collaborators, as well as funding for their facilities – came out of NIH grants. So did the funding for the initial Phase I trial, and the ongoing large Phase II trial.

As David Dayen writes in The American Prospect, the proposed patent transfer will make Hinrichs a very wealthy man (Love calls it "generational wealth"):

https://prospect.org/health/2023-10-18-nih-how-to-become-billionaire-program/

This wealth will come by charging us – the public – to access a drug that we paid to produce. The public took all the risks to develop this drug, and Hinrichs stands to become a billionaire by reaping the rewards – rewards that will come by extracting fortunes from terrified people who don't want to die from tumors that are eating them alive.

The transfer of this patent is indefensible. The government isn't even waiting until the Phase II trials are complete to hand over our commonly owned science.

But there's still time. The NIH is about to get a new director, Monica Bertagnolli – Hinrichs's former boss – who will need to go before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee for confirmation. Love is hoping that the confirmation hearing will present an opportunity to question Bertagnolli about the transfer – specifically, why the drug isn't being nonexclusively licensed to lots of drug companies who will have to compete to sell the cheapest possible version.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/19/solid-tumors/#t-cell-receptors

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

[cestacruz]

Pharma shouldve been in TFP if only to make the Synthetic Energon problem an even Bigger problem

[idontmindifuforgetme]

I’ll be a doctor one day and all the pharmaceutical reps will be waiting in the lobby for hours begging for a chance to speak with me to push their samples to patients and I’ll have pharmaceutical companies buying free lunch for my employees every day just so they can sit w me at lunch and speak to me and I’ll also have a housewife/husband but instead it’ll be an office wife/husband and they’ll run the managerial aspects of my hospital for me . Among other things

[lord-squiggletits]

It was only after I finished drawing this that someone explained to me that that's not how bongs work and Pharma is "eating the weed like a horse while simultaneously boiling the water"

I guess just pretend that my embarrassing mistake is in character for Pharma or something

[tanadrin]

i know this is very 2004 internet atheist of me, but god alternative medicine gives me such a headache sometimes. "let's take this nonsense practice developed by a civil war doctor back when we thought ghosts caused masturbation and try to professionalize it and make it a Serious Discipline." and then it becomes insanely popular here because Germans fucking love bullshit non-medicine and are terrified of pills.

[deepdreamnights]

Prescription Medications as Pokemon via NijiJourney

I found a list of the 15 most advertised (in the US, obviously) prescription drugs of 2015 and turned them into pokemon via NiniJourney (the Midjourney anime/manga specific model) v6, and the following base prompt:

full color illustration of the pokemon (drug name here) , official art, bulbapedia, fullbody, white background, gen 6

Most were iterated multiple times, a few were given minor edits to erase extraneous nonsense parts or touch up the color saturation/tone. Tried to keep the plant-types and the "basically a lady" types to a few examples each, something the robot resisted.

Nothing to get anywhere near what I'd consider the minimal expression threshold, so public domain all around.

May post promising spares as a separate post. Might not, dunno.

[reasonsforhope]

"The Biden administration on Thursday [August 15, 2024] released prices for the first 10 prescription drugs that were subject to landmark negotiations between drugmakers and Medicare, a milestone in a controversial process that aims to make costly medications more affordable for older Americans. 

The government estimates that the new negotiated prices for the medications will lead to around $6 billion in net savings for the Medicare program in 2026 alone when they officially go into effect, or 22% net savings overall. That is based on the estimated savings the prices would have produced if they were in effect in 2023, senior administration officials told reporters Wednesday.

The Biden administration also expects the new prices to save Medicare enrollees $1.5 billion in out-of-pocket costs in 2026 alone.

“For so many people, being able to afford these drugs will mean the difference between debilitating illness and living full lives,” Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, told reporters. “These negotiated prices. They’re not just about costs. They are about helping to make sure that your father, your grandfather or you can live longer, healthier.”

It comes one day before the second anniversary of President Joe Biden’s signature Inflation Reduction Act, which gave Medicare the power to directly hash out drug prices with manufacturers for the first time in the federal program’s nearly 60-year history.

Here are the negotiated prices for a 30-day supply of the 10 drugs, along with their list prices based on 2023 prescription fills, according to a Biden administration fact sheet Thursday.

What Medicare and beneficiaries pay for a drug is often much less than the list price, which is what a wholesaler, distributor or other direct purchaser paid a manufacturer for a medication before any discounts...

The administration unveiled the first set of medications selected for the price talks in August 2023, kicking off a nearly yearlong negotiation period that ended at the beginning of the month.

The final prices give drugmakers, which fiercely oppose the policy, a glimpse of how much revenue they could expect to lose over the next few years. It also sets a precedent for the additional rounds of Medicare drug price negotiations, which will kick off in 2025 and beyond. 

First 10 drugs subject to Medicare price negotiations

Eliquis, made by Bristol Myers Squibb, is used to prevent blood clotting to reduce the risk of stroke. 

Jardiance, made by Boehringer Ingelheim and Eli Lilly, is used to lower blood sugar for people with Type 2 diabetes. 

Xarelto, made by Johnson & Johnson, is used to prevent blood clotting, to reduce the risk of stroke.

Januvia, made by Merck, is used to lower blood sugar for people with Type 2 diabetes.

Farxiga, made by AstraZeneca, is used to treat Type 2 diabetes, heart failure and chronic kidney disease. 

Entresto, made by Novartis, is used to treat certain types of heart failure.

Enbrel, made by Amgen, is used to treat autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis. 

Imbruvica, made by AbbVie and J&J, is used to treat different types of blood cancers. 

Stelara, made by Janssen, is used to treat autoimmune diseases such as Crohn’s disease.

Fiasp and NovoLog, insulins made by Novo Nordisk.

In a statement Thursday, Biden called the new negotiated prices a “historic milestone” made possible because of the Inflation Reduction Act. He specifically touted Vice President Kamala Harris’ tiebreaking vote for the law in the Senate in 2022.

Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, said in a statement that she was proud to cast that deciding vote, adding there is more work to be done to lower health-care costs for Americans.

“Today’s announcement will be lifechanging for so many of our loved ones across the nation, and we are not stopping here,” Harris said in a statement Thursday, noting that additional prescription drugs will be selected for future rounds of negotiations."

-via CNBC, August 15, 2024

[reality-detective]

In case you didn't know this 👆 If you listen to side effects, they have a drug for them to. 🤔

[allthecanadianpolitics]

London Drugs has told its employees certain corporate files, which include employee information, may have been compromised in the cyberattack a few weeks ago.

In an internal memo obtained by Global News, London Drugs said its investigation into the cyberattack has found evidence which indicates some head office files have been compromised.

The memo was sent out to employees on Thursday.

“We are not yet able to provide any specifics on the nature of employee personal information potentially impacted,” the memo said. [...]

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @newsfromstolenland, @vague-humanoid

[irhabiya]

i genuinely hate when professors interrupt my presentations so much. i was already speeding through it it's all pharma and there's so much important shit to cover and she's like "skip skip khalas yallah faster" and THEN SHE COMPLAINED THAT I SEEMED OUT OF BREATH WHILE PRESENTING LADY WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME -_-!!!!