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| Blindness Cure |
Many great scientific discoveries are born of pure chance. How about curing blindness in one or two treatments with a drug originally designed to fight cancer?
What if it only costs the same as taking family movies? Impressed yet? You should be. Doctors have used Avastin (bevacizumab), cancer drugs, to treat certain types of blindness, such as retinopathy, vascular, and the initiative has generated more than anyone ever imagined that the drug would be 20% more effective than traditional laser treatment.
However, it is always obstacles to good ideas, and this time they are human rather than technical. Roche Group, the company behind Avastin, simply does not support its use in the treatment of retinopathy. Why? Roche's official position is that they are concerned about patient safety, because Avastin is not designed for use in eye diseases.
Doctors in the United States and Great Britain have tried for many years for Roche to conduct clinical trials to compare the effectiveness of Avastin and Lucentis, but Roche has been reluctant, for obvious reasons.
But maybe it has less to do with alleged safety problems and more with the fact that the cost of Avastin forty times smaller than Lucentis (ranibizumab), Roche publicly supported treatment retinopathy?
This raises the question of how truly real is the pharmaceutical industry. This is not a secret that the pharmaceutical industry is expensive, especially in the United States. The United States, which spends more on health care in developed countries, largely due to drugs, and manages to have the highest rate of infant mortality and diabetes.
Moreover, the United States is also the only country that allows drug advertising on public television. It is this practice that inflated drug prices for the average consumer - the marketing budget of a particular solution, usually always included in the price of the manufacturer. This and other business practices increasing drug prices to obscene amounts even if the actual costs of drug production cents per pill.
But more is at stake here that pharmaceutical companies are trying to cover overhead costs by higher prices for medicines. The most outrageous aspect of all this controversy over Avastin vs. Lucentis was that Roche openly refused to accept, or even test a product that was obviously efficiently, while trying to pass a nearly exact copy of forty times the price. Of course, in a capitalist economy are all within their rights to make a profit on a product of their decisions, but this is also the problem. The main priority of any private enterprise is not really produce anything but a profit of what it produces.
