Scientists See AIDS Vaccine Within Reach: Will We See a Cure for AIDS in the 21st Century?
Heisenberg
2012/07/16 16:00:00
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After decades of working on it, some scientists say they see an AIDS vaccine within reach. Do you believe it?
REUTERS.COM reports:
REUTERS.COM reports:
At an ill-fated press conference in 1984, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret Heckler boldly predicted an effective AIDS vaccine would be available within just two years.
Read More: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/15/us-aids-...
Beyond that, we're also now discussing things within the realm of temporary fixes. With all of that research and marketing and testing going on, a drug that actually provides a permanent solution would be a loss, which is why they would never seek to produce such a drug, which is precisely my point.
What we have here is a clash between two mindsets: one oriented around the elimination of disease and the common good, and one that views AIDS treatment as business.
I won't go into this too much, but the idea that Pharma isn't aiming to cure, but treat for profit is false. If there was a cure out and Phama can't prevent another company from going after it, a cure would be highly profitable and a small start up company (of which there are many) would at least have a basis to go on. Are there potential cures out there? Yes, I believe they are, but there are many problems in drug design in industry right now. They currently nix any molecule that covalently modifies due to toxicity assumptions, this is starting to turn around in the last few years due to some significant work in both industry and academia, but it is only now becoming even acceptable. Along with the wave of combinatorial chemistry, intelligent drug design has fallen by the wayside. This IS still there, but it is a much smaller amount than before. Also, natural products are big, but not as much as they used to be....
I understand that it "sounds" reasonable to always treat, but it isn't realistic. Really thi...
I won't go into this too much, but the idea that Pharma isn't aiming to cure, but treat for profit is false. If there was a cure out and Phama can't prevent another company from going after it, a cure would be highly profitable and a small start up company (of which there are many) would at least have a basis to go on. Are there potential cures out there? Yes, I believe they are, but there are many problems in drug design in industry right now. They currently nix any molecule that covalently modifies due to toxicity assumptions, this is starting to turn around in the last few years due to some significant work in both industry and academia, but it is only now becoming even acceptable. Along with the wave of combinatorial chemistry, intelligent drug design has fallen by the wayside. This IS still there, but it is a much smaller amount than before. Also, natural products are big, but not as much as they used to be....
I understand that it "sounds" reasonable to always treat, but it isn't realistic. Really this just shows how hard these problems are. Cancer, for one, cannot be cured. The nature of the disease (i.e. DNA damage) cannot be prevented, and you don't want to prevent it b/c this is also how we get evolution. We can have some very good treatments for cancer. Pfizer I believe announced a few years ago at an insiders meeting that current developments have cancer "under control" which is huge.
You can't make the claim that I'm wrong about Pharma being in it for a profit rather than to help people, and then support it by saying that a cure would be profitable to the company that could lay claim to it. Again, wrong mentality altogether.
Pharma, and business as a whole, are most certainly in it to make a profit. Cancer has no magic cure due to the very nature of the disease, yes, but the very fact that we constantly focus on drugs as the solution is our problem. Vegetables, stress reduction, and exercise would take a huge chunk out of degenerative diseases as a whole, but there's no emphasis placed on it because nobody pays for it.
Going even further, no amount of inside explanation will ever make it true that a successful company runs a self-destructing business model. Your car has degeneration and inefficiency built into it, and somebody sells the parts-probably the same company that makes the car. Eradicating a disease altogether and waiting for a new one to pop up would be like producing a car that runs for a century on the parts it came with. An altruist would make that, not a business.
The model of Pharma sounds crazy, but the fact is there can always be improvements. The more we know they more we can accurately design a drug to cure x, y, and z. The first generation drug rarely is the end (hence why people always expect Pharma to only treat), Cis-platin for example for years was considered the "magic bullet" (or as close as we will get), but cancers became resistant to the drug. Nature is constantly evolving, ourselves included, this is why Pharma will always have a job (even though they may not always have the impact they did). Even if you throw out evolution, there is so much we don't know. For example, we know that protein tyrosine phosphates (PTP) are important signaling molecules (one of which could be used to cure type 2 diabetes); however, there are ~100 in the human body and we probably know what ~10-20 do and only the details on less than 5. Outside of all that, we aren't that smart to design something that treats but doesn't cure. Very small differences in structure make huge differences in toxicity, binding, etc....many of these changes are not predictable.
I really do think, though, that what many would view as an unlikely conspiracy is, in reality, often just a good business practice, and that funding and executive decisions often come from business, not scientists.
Let's agree to disagree, and to eat our vegetables.
Big Pharma is good.
And this is also coming from a man that wants to release genetically modified mosquitoes, modified to inject us all with vaccines... He's one sick freak...
In all honesty I have no idea what point you are trying to get across, either. I am certain of one thing, though; you aren't coming off as very intelligent.
Do liberals EVER get it right?
Either way, there probably are cures. Just good luck getting them fda approved or on the nightly news. Our medical system is only for treatments that may or may not work.
Its only a small microcosm of the whole issue, but an important part of it.
First of all, you don;t practically die from AIDS, but because your organism grows weaker by it, you get infected more easily by other diseases and die. Till, they find a way to prevent people from AIDS, they can just help them go through the other dieseases, without dieing.