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Whenever I praise Big Pharma, people accuse me of being in the pocket of the industry. Really, it’s much worse. I praise Big Pharma gratis. Because no business, save perhaps Big Agriculture, has done more to improve our lives.
Take cancer and heart disease, the two biggest killers of Americans. Here’s what’s happened on those fronts in just the past couple of months.
In May, Eli Lilly announced clinical trials for a gene-editing treatment that dramatically lowers bad cholesterol, one of the primary drivers of heart disease. The technology permanently alters a gene in the liver that acts as a brake on the body’s ability to clear bad cholesterol from the blood. When the brake is removed, the liver begins removing bad cholesterol naturally.
In trials, people saw their LDL levels drop by 62%, a far bigger reduction than you see with existing treatments. People with high cholesterol would be able to get a single infusion rather than take pills every day, permanently lowering their risk.
If the therapy works in larger trials and comes to market, it would be a near-miracle in the fight against heart disease. It could extend the lives of millions of people.
I’m going to think about gene therapy the next time some Luddite starts railing against “Big Pharma” like the industry is an immoral drain on society.
The same week as Lilly’s announcement, Revolution Medicines announced successful clinical trials for a novel pill that helps people with advanced pancreatic cancer live longer.
Right now, the five-year overall survival rate is 13%. Daraxonrasib doubled that time. It targets a gene called KRAS, which is mutated in many different types of cancer. The long-term prospects of the technology are immense.
“While not curing the cancer, it is a very large step forward,” Dr. Zev Wainberg, one of the leaders in the study, told NPR.
One of the factors that makes pancreatic cancer so deadly is a lack of reliable early screenings. In April, the Mayo Clinic announced it had developed an artificial intelligence-powered early detection system that was designed to spot “subtle radiomic tissue textures in standard CT scans.” The scan can identify hidden signs of pancreatic cancer months, even years, before a traditional clinical diagnosis.
Also last month, Moderna and Merck announced an experimental vaccine that may halve the chances of fatal skin cancer returning for five years. A personalized mRNA vaccine — the mRNA technology that our crank Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claims has little upside — left 70% of people cancer-free, compared to 49% of people in a normal treatment group. The vaccine cut a person’s risk of the cancer metastasizing by nearly 60%.
Though I’m not a medical researcher, that certainly sounds promising to me.
Even without these breakthroughs, cancer survival rates in the United States have improved dramatically over the past 30 years. Prostate cancer survival has gone from 68% to 98%, breast cancer rates from 75% to 91%, and Leukemia from 42% to 66%.
The same week this was all going on, Eli Lilly also announced major positive results for “retatrutide,” an experimental weight-loss and diabetes medication that, unlike medications such as Ozempic, targets three hormone receptors. It has driven record-breaking weight losses as well as significant “systemic anti-inflammatory and joint-pain relief.”
All of that news is from the past six weeks. Yet, Big Pharma remains one of the least popular industries in the U.S. — beneath the media, if you can believe it.
Most of the animosity is likely driven by the seemingly exorbitant cost of some drugs. Socialists such as Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) endlessly promise to hold Big Pharma “accountable” for their profit-mongering.
If they get their way, we’ll have fewer life-saving medicines and therapies. Pharma is “Big” because if it were small, it wouldn’t be able to do useful things. You don’t bring major drugs to the marketplace using chemistry sets in your mom-and-pop shop. It takes about a decade and a massive expenditure of capital, around $2 billion to $3 billion on average, to create a new product. The risk is also immense. The chances that a drug ever sees the marketplace are exceptionally low — around 90% of them fail in clinical trials.
Others, skeptical after public health officials, with the help of states and the federal government, effectively forced millions of people to inject themselves with fast-tracked vaccines for COVID-19 under the threat of losing their jobs and positions, have bought into the conspiracism and quackery of Kennedy and other Luddites.
Vaccines have transformed numerous once-deadly ailments that might have killed your grandparents into nothing but unpleasant footnotes of history. The anti-vaccine movement is self-destructive and dangerous.
No one, of course, is saying pharma execs are saints. Like in any industry, there are bad actors, rent seekers, and shortcut takers. The difference is that Big Pharma doesn’t just do some good things in the aggregate — it does mostly good things, which is not something we can say for many other big corporate sectors.
In the not-too-distant future, it is highly probable that people will have drugs that not only effectively eliminate the threat of cancer, heart diseases, and obesity, but also better manage Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and autoimmune diseases. Pharma already helps millions of people deal with debilitating pain, manage chronic diseases, mitigate incapacitating depression, enjoy intimacy for longer in their lives, control high blood pressure and diabetes, make more children, and ensure longer lives.
Doomsdayers and cynical partisans are endlessly depicting our country as a spent force that doesn’t “make” anything useful anymore. By every metric, the U.S. pharmaceutical industry dominates the world. The knee-jerk demonization of pharma is lazy and irrational.
Because everyone hates pharma in the abstract. Everyone loves it when the technology saves their lives.
(COMMENT, BELOW)
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