Corporate Profits Take Priority over Breast Cancer Prevention?

A recent Nature article describes the cancellation of a planned NIH trial (STELLAR) that would have compared the effects of newcomer drug Letrozole to the older Raloxifene in preventing breast cancer in post-menopausal women. While many potentially valid reasons were offered for the cancellation, other issues raised give cause to question whether the North American approach to cancer drug development is fatally flawed:

"the panel was strongly influenced by the fact that letrozole, made by Novartis, goes off-patent in 2011."

Translation: Who cares if letrozole prevents breast cancer if a corporate monopoly won't have the chance to exploit for ridiculous profits?

Hopefully this statement was issued by a disgruntled colleague and the Novartis bottom line doesn't really determine NIH trial funding decisions. Did Novartis threaten to drop their $30M/free drug contribution to the US government's $55M investment? Why should Novartis' interests be the only priority here? Once the drug is off-patent, it would available for generic production and even more accessible to patients. Must we always look for financial "returns" to justify investment in medical research? Isn't improving human health enough of a payback? Maybe it's about time North American governments reclaim some capital from the private sector to support publicly-funded research that benefits human beings instead of accountants.

Embryonic Stem Cells (tm) by Invitrogen

Caught a great talk today at the OHRI by visiting speaker Mahendra S. Rao, who is probably the world's leading scientist in embryonic/neural stem cell therapies. The talk featured an overwhelmingly impressive wealth of data on neural stem cell biology, particularly pertaining to transplant studies. Most of this work was done in his former capacity as head of the NIH's stem cell program.

What was most interesting about the talk was the work Rao is now leading as VP Stem Cell research at Invitrogen Corp (in the more ES-cell research friendly state of California). He recently took up this post after leaving the NIH as a result of their decision to abandon ES cell research in light of the Bush administration's strong anti ES cell research policies. From what he presented of his new project at Invitrogen, it's obvious they are now about to kick some serious ass in the arena of clinical therapeutic development. They've got GMP-friendly, FDA-approved and production-scalable technologies and ES cell lines ready to go. Couple with that Invitrogen's recent moves that has established the company as the leader in gene expression and cell culture technologies, and what you have is imminent domination of the biological therapies scene. Looks like one of the first applications they will go after is Parkinson's disease, using ES-derived neurons to replenish dopamine producers in the substantia nigra.

Interestingly, while transplanted ES-derived neurons are suitable for applications such as Parkinson's as they can survive long-term in recipient's brain, Rao mentioned that their potential in other regenerative therapies is limited by the fact that we do not yet know how to make the transplanted cells properly integrate into existing neuronal circuitry. Strong impetus for a lot of interesting research in probing neural connectivity...