The disabling of hardware codecs in community distributions

Posted Oct 18, 2022 18:44 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: The disabling of hardware codecs in community distributions by nim-nim
Parent article: The disabling of hardware codecs in community distributions

> One reason it’s absurdly difficult to create new drugs is that big pharma players go out of their way to avoid the patents of other players. The patent lock is such a lot of money is expended in inventing new square wheels.

Sorry, but this is total nonsense. Drug patents in general are _very_ specific. So they will apply only if you are working on improving an existing drug.

New drugs are expensive because they _mostly_ _fail_. Around 90% of drug candidates fail during clinical tests.

It's that bad. And if anything, it's getting worse.

The disabling of hardware codecs in community distributions

Posted Oct 19, 2022 7:54 UTC (Wed) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (4 responses)

Sorry, but no. The stories of companies pivoting from research on other illnesses to covid, or trying to prove a variant of existing patented drugs works on something else, could have been written about software startups.

The disabling of hardware codecs in community distributions

Posted Oct 19, 2022 11:29 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Bear in mind, in the UK, a lot of companies got given contracts that effectively gave them a blank cheque to work on CoVid. I don't know all the details, but it sounds like it was along the lines of

Pharma: we've got this idea we think might work ...
UK Gov: Okay, try it, here's a contract for 10 million doses whether it works or not ...

That's one of the reasons our vaccine roll-out was so fast - we ordered huge quantities before other countries really woke up, so we were at the head of the queue once pharma started delivering.

So a lot of money was "wasted" on vaccines that didn't work. But how much money was *saved* because we were well ahead of the curve getting our people vaccinated? Personally I think it was money well spent ...

So yep, the companies were throwing research at it, but it wasn't research THEY were paying for.

Cheers,
Wol

The disabling of hardware codecs in community distributions

Posted Oct 19, 2022 19:34 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

Which stories?

Repurposing existing drugs does happen, but it's a really minor activity. Simply because there's not too much to repurpose.

You can look at the list of FDA approved drugs: https://www.drugs.com/newdrugs.html

The disabling of hardware codecs in community distributions

Posted Oct 19, 2022 20:52 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

I think you'll find re-purposing is major business ... the classic example of course is that little blue pill ...

But certainly for the illness I'm involved with (Parkinsons), probably the majority of the current research bill is looking for drugs to re-purpose ...

Cheers,
Wol

The disabling of hardware codecs in community distributions

Posted Oct 20, 2022 19:38 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

> I think you'll find re-purposing is major business ... the classic example of course is that little blue pill ...

Viagra is not an example of a repurposed drug. It's an example of a new drug that failed in its clinical trials (against angina pectoris). It just so happened that its side effects were interesting enough in their own right.