Federal Government To Develop Its Own Drugs In Effort to Spur Pharmaceutical Industry

I think the main problem w/ drug industry is this:

They first find a natural compound from plants, animals, microorganisms that works against a disease, but since they cannot get a patent on a natural compound, next they create an artificial similar molecule that has similar effects. The problem is the artificial one has tons of dangerous side effects!

So the public ends up using dangerous low quality drugs for high prices, instead of cheap and safe natural drugs!

I don't know about you, but I wouldn't trust drugs that the government manufactures.

Besides, the gov't needs to be cutting spending right now. Anything that is not a necessity needs to GO.

The pharmaceutical industry wouldnt be in the situation it is now if not for a certain president in the 90's who put a 2 year limit on FDA pattents.
Before a drug ever hts the shelf it has to undergo years of research and 7 years of clinical trials. All at the expense of the company. It takes an average of 5 years to recoup the costs.

"So the public ends up using dangerous low quality drugs for high prices, instead of cheap and safe natural drugs!"

I'm not going to get into the politics here - just not going to touch that - but this I have to take issue with, because it's a science issue, to say nothing of a fairly common misunderstanding. The fact that a chemical is naturally occurring does *not* automatically mean that it must be abundant and safe for human consumption.

Manannan has it right. The article illustrates the massive, rising cost of approving new drugs but sort of overlooks the reason: increasingly restrictive (and thus expensive) government oversight. A $1 billion incentive against $45 billion in research is going to have very little effect.

There's a good case to be made that a significant portion of that oversight is unnecessary. Absent any government regulation at all, drug companies still have an incentive to introduce drugs that are effective and safe. If they aren't, they lose money, may be liable for massive damages, and may go out of business. It's time to re-evaluate FDA regulations and streamline them so they make sense and work with normal market incentives instead of significantly impeding them.

I am not against private drug companies but since they would not invest in producing natural drugs (because there is not much money to be made from them), only solution is if the government runs some drug research labs that focus on finding ways to produce natural drugs in large quantities.

For example today there is technology to genetically alter yeast cells etc. to make them produce any needed drug. (But it would work as long as you try to produce a natural compound, they would not produce artificial drugs anyway.)

Also even when there are any side effects caused by natural compounds, they are really temporary because natural compounds get easily breakdown in the human body, whereas there are some artificial drugs that stay for a long time and keep causing damage.

Our president is all to happy to spend money drugging people. However when it comes to real science that might move the United States forward, he like his predecessor is woefully lacking. It's all about bread and circuses, keep the masses numb and happy.

This is another example of an out of control federal government. The reason drugs take so long to develop and are so costly is because of government regulations!

If it can cost 1.3 billion dollars and takes years to bring a drug to market, then how does this government agency propose to bring even a single drug to market with a 1 billion dollar budget. And talking about human trials? For what! It takes years just to get a drug to the human trials stage.

Obama and the democrats are raging out of control. This is yet another example of a solution for a problem the government created, but as with most government "solutions" it doesn't solve much of anything and costs a fortune.

@bigburb,

"I don't know about you, but I wouldn't trust drugs that the government manufactures."

Interesting... yet I'd be willing to bet you have no problem trusting the water that the government manufactures, the roads that they manufacture, the military they manufacture, or... even most obviously... the Internet itself which they manufactured some 50 years ago.

But no, yeah, you're totally right, we should have just sat around and waited for AT&T to invent the Internet, or for Merck to supply drinking water, or maybe Haliburton to build all of the roads.

JUST SAY NO.

OMG - when will a focus be put on strengthening the human body to use the natural healing abilities instead of trying to cure everything with drugs? Honestly I'd rather see more research on advanced technologies like stem-cell, "nano-bots" to heal breast cancer or even pure holistic health research. I agree with k4202, Just Say No.