A Cure for AIDS

i'm putting my 2c in here, as a pharmacologist's perspective...

given that most drugs take 10-12 years to go from lab to shelf, the production costs are usually astronomical, having been designed, synthesised, tested, reconfigured, tested again, clinically trialled at least four times, then mass produced. you also have to allow for the frankly obscene amount of drugs which don't make it to mass production due to any number of reasons, yet have still amassed gargantuan overheads. companies like gsk, astrazeneca, etc. need to recouperate all costs so that they continue to make new drugs, otherwise there'd be no research and no new medicines.

what are your qualms about avastin, aside from its costs?

and regarding this article, it's great news, but for one, sky are useless (there's no such thing as the wrongly-quoted "aids virus" - hiv is the virus, aids is only a syndrome). secondly, and most unfortunately, it seems more of a medical one-off, given that you would have to have all of your bone marrow destroyed before you could have a transplant, to provide an autoimmune response (sky actually mentioned this in that article), and then you'd have to find a donor who had a natural resistance to hiv, which doesn't come around too often!

As has been stated, bone marrow transplants are simply too risky for this to be considered as a viable cure to HIV. What could be interesting is carrying out gene therapy research on people who are resistant to HIV (such as the donor).

HIV has been considered as a manageable condition (like diabetes) in the developed world for a while now. Through anti retroviral treatment, the amount of the virus in the blood can be lowered to undetectable levels, making the chances of transmission virtually zero. Where the problem is is Africa. Drugs are simply too expensive for your average African infected with HIV to afford, and added to this, a different strain is prevalent in most of Africa (HIV-2), which although less infectious than the more common strain at first, is much more viral in later stages of the disease. This is why HIV in Africa is considered a ticking time bomb. And there are also subtle differences as to how you treat the different strains, and it is difficult to measure the viral loads (how much of the virus is in the body) of people with HIV-2, so who knows if this 'cure' (from a white European resistant to HIV) will apply to African's? In the meantime drug companies need to allow cheap generic versions of their drugs to be made available to Africa as the HIV prevalence rates are really scary.

what are you basing your "25 grand" on? i explained earlier wy drugs are so expensive, especially when they're new. you can pick up generic versions of paracetamol, ibuprofen and other NSAIDs for less than 50p, but that's because they've been about for years and the patents have run out. whoever developed avastin (i ashamedly don't know this, but it's more than likely gsk) will have but an almighty amount of money into it since the early-to-mid nineties, and now it's commercially available, will need to recoup some of those costs.

for the record, it does work, it's only GIT and breast cancers which it doesn't really affect. what else, other than to "basically just prolong life for 3 months" would you expect it to do? given that cancer is an uncurable disease...

I think i'll take the diabete's thanks!!

a drug cure to aids is gonna be really hard to get out, the pharmaceutical companies make way too much money treating aids to consider the one off payment curing option imo

That must be shit like. Having AIDS and leukaemia (at the same time)

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I dont know who's worse. the bloke that took the time out to create that pile of shite or you for posting it.

There are cases of African prostitutes whose body has rid itself of AIDs - they are the people they should be looking for towards a vaccine!

either way, the song is bang on.

If this seemingly shocks you - you should look into the price of antibiotics etc and the sheer amount the NHS dispenses. A ratio of patients against mass makes 25k look fuck all

i'm guessing you mean 25k per course of treatment? is treatment indefinite? i know it's in fortnightly doses, but is it 25k irrespective of whether you receive one or twenty?

roche aren't somebody i know a lot about to be honest, but given that they're not one of the three large producers (gsk, astrazeneca, pfizer), that's even more reason why they need to recouperate costs.

i'm not trying to be high and mighty or get on any form of high horse here, just trying to give a pharmacological point of view to balance out all the conspiracy theorists.

You chump!

typical shit mackem crack, well in

keep em coming

That picture is bang on!