'Medicine Needs To Embrace Open Source' (zdnet.com) 77
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols from ZDNet argues that "the expensive and abusive pharmaceutical industry needs to open up to improve everyone's health." An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: Now, I know little about creating and testing drugs. Here's what I do know: Open source and data produces better results than proprietary methods. In technology, the field I know best, almost every company -- including open source poster-child enemy Microsoft -- has embraced open source. Why? Because it works better than the short-sighted proprietary approaches. It's not just programming that benefits from open source. Cars now run Linux under the hood. Energy and electricity transmission managers are moving to open source. Most of the movies you love are made with open-source programs. Heck, even contract law is going open source.
I'm far from the only one to conclude that open-source methods are needed to break what amounts to broken pharmaceutical research methodology and drug price gouging. Open Source Pharma, an organization devoted to building on existing initiatives to develop an alternative, comprehensive, open-source pharmaceutical system, is leading the way. Dr. Manica Balasegaram, executive director for the Access Campaign of Medecins Sans Frontieres, aka Doctors Without Borders, explained: "There is something rotten in the kingdom of biomedical R&D... That the system is inefficient is probably difficult to dispute. It works in silos, encourages a protectionist, proprietary approach, promotes duplication, multiplies failure, is costly, and importantly, is directed at markets and not at public health needs. The consequences are fatal." Open source can revolutionize our hunt for better, more affordable medicine. It has everywhere else. It can in medicine, too. "We need to fundamentally let go of thinking that there is only one possible business model," says Balasegaram. "We need alternatives. Open source R&D is the key." Since the biomedical field is dominated by big companies with an iron grip on IP, Balasegaram admitted: "Promoting the concept of sharing will be tough. Sharing, however, is a difficult and somewhat scary idea to promote. It sounds suspiciously 'radical.' However, when one takes into account that this has been done in other areas, we need to rethink our reservations."
I'm far from the only one to conclude that open-source methods are needed to break what amounts to broken pharmaceutical research methodology and drug price gouging. Open Source Pharma, an organization devoted to building on existing initiatives to develop an alternative, comprehensive, open-source pharmaceutical system, is leading the way. Dr. Manica Balasegaram, executive director for the Access Campaign of Medecins Sans Frontieres, aka Doctors Without Borders, explained: "There is something rotten in the kingdom of biomedical R&D... That the system is inefficient is probably difficult to dispute. It works in silos, encourages a protectionist, proprietary approach, promotes duplication, multiplies failure, is costly, and importantly, is directed at markets and not at public health needs. The consequences are fatal." Open source can revolutionize our hunt for better, more affordable medicine. It has everywhere else. It can in medicine, too. "We need to fundamentally let go of thinking that there is only one possible business model," says Balasegaram. "We need alternatives. Open source R&D is the key." Since the biomedical field is dominated by big companies with an iron grip on IP, Balasegaram admitted: "Promoting the concept of sharing will be tough. Sharing, however, is a difficult and somewhat scary idea to promote. It sounds suspiciously 'radical.' However, when one takes into account that this has been done in other areas, we need to rethink our reservations."
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Let's assume we have a bitter programmer living in his mom's basement w
Most of the work is done at public universities (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Most of the work is done at public universities (Score:5, Insightful)
Profits are the problem, it is a fallacy to say that people primarily motivated by money. If that where even slightly true people would not go on holiday's buy expensive cars since that would maximize our money, but what we are actually trying to do is maximize our happiness. After the point you a comfortable, it extremely expensive to buy extra happiness, you only buy relative happiness because you can think you are better than others. You can do this with the prestige of contributing to society.
Yes you do need some money for people to live comfortably, but the people making the real money are not the people doing the innovation. If you take it to the extreme why would a company ever try to cure anyone? There is more profit simply treating you for the rest of your life. Also once you have a patient it is in your interest just to stop other people developing new technology on top of that, Since it is cheaper to simply do nothing and collect the profit.
Re:Most of the work is done at public universities (Score:5, Interesting)
Universities and the government does sell patents and do technology transfers for money.
There are problems with that model, the biggest one is that the University/government generally can't wait to sell its stuff to generate money and thus will often sell low just to get it sold in the first place. Those institutions are horrible negotiators, they've got lower wages than the private industry so you can get a lot of concessions simply by wining and dining a low-end administrator that has been stuck at the job for a few decades and has no direct benefit from the sale.
It may look like a vast conspiracy but it's just a series of low-pay useless people in an office doing a poor job.
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Writing open sourced software requires minimal infrastructure and up front costs. Creating a new drug to alleviate Parkinson's Disease disabilities requires substantial upfront costs and success is never guaranteed. It requires paying for top medical researchers, doctors, lab techs, extensive lab environments, and dealing with government regulations. Drugs are overpriced in general but the patents on pharmaceuticals expire and allow generics to regulate the price. Those developing the drug have a relativel
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Patents are SUPPOSE to expire but often do not. They can last years past their expiration preventing generic drugs from coming to the market.
Generic drug prices have been rising. This has largely been driven by market consolidation. Fewer and fewer generic companies producing drugs as companies by other companies.
Dug companies spend more money on Marketing then they do on R&D.
Drug companies are not producing the wonder kin dru
The system is already open source. (Score:1)
Research costs money.
Patents are a way to make money for a certain time to get compensated for that initial investment.
Patents registration are a way to document and insures open-sourcing those same inventions and medicine.
Patent expiration are a way to insure that after they recuperate and profit enough to finance more research, the inventions become usable by all for free.
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Good research, requires good people. Bad research requires psychopathic corporate executives and researchers, corrupt lobbyists and corrupt politicians and produces bad outcomes. This is what is happening, not what benefit the pharmaceuticals provide but what profit, so number one, 'TREAT THE SYMPTOMS NEVER CURE THE DISEASE', and that is the reality.
When money is the goal and not good health outcomes, well money is what the research will produce, along with very poor health outcomes, just the way it is.
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Most of the work is done at public universities
According to the NIH, most of the funding for that R&D comes from the private sector.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/b [nih.gov]...
"In 2004, federal agencies funded roughly one-third of all U.S. biomedical R and D (Moses et al. 2005). "
"Private sector drug, biotechnology, and medical device companies provide the majority of U.S. biomedical R and D funding (about 58 percent)."
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Nope. Public research does not do "most" of the work. They barely scratch the surface.
You discover a new compound that kills cancer cells in a petri dish. Great! So do lots of things (bleach, arsenic, etc). Now what?
Can you give the compound to patients without killing them or genera
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None of the reasons you've outline above contribute to the high cost of drugs today.
Defend the Epi Pen ass-hole. $300 for an item that costs $5 to make by a company who did not make the item in the first place so there is zero cost to recoup.
Defend Pharma Bro who's business model was to "obtain licenses on out-of-patent medicines and reevaluate the pricing of each in pursuit o
You sure? (Score:1)
You sure you want to wonder if the defibrillator is running systemd when you're on a stretcher riding in the ambulance?
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I wonder why you equate a PC OS with an embedded device running a real time kernel.
Systemd works great if you take the time to learn it. Much better than init.
On the other hand, "Maybe you have no business working on any OS
on any system."
Off topic, but if all you want to do is whine, stay away please.
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The cost to bring a drug to market (Score:5, Insightful)
is estimated to be between $648 million and $2.7 billion https://www.managedcaremag.com/news/20170914/costs-bring-drug-market-remain-dispute [managedcaremag.com]. The regimen that the FDA requires for drug development is hostile to an Open Source approach. It will need to evolve as well.
Re:The cost to bring a drug to market (Score:5, Insightful)
Japan, the EU and Switzerland are examples of testing management organizations that are just as good as our FDA. One way we could save, and speed up new drug development worldwide, is for all these organizations to agree on a framework for accepting each other's test results. This would effectively be divvying up the work on testing new compounds, rather than having the FDA take extra years duplicating every other country's efforts as it does now. Smaller countries could buy into this test regime by specializing in limited classes of coumpounds, coordinated internationally so everything is covered.
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Look at how well the 737 MAX mess has turned out. Other countries are going to be less trusting of US certifications going forward.
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Look at how well the 737 MAX mess has turned out. Other countries are going to be less trusting of US certifications going forward.
Erm, that is because we permitted aircraft manufacturers to self certify, not because we have a world wide common certification framework. The world wide common framework is quite good, letting Boeing say their plane is safe, pinky promise with no lying, with no independent testing is the problem.
The OP is proposing nothing of the sort. The OP is proposing that the various regulatory agencies agree on common testing methods and requirements to certify medications so that a drug passed by the UK's MHRA ca
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The US can't export its agri products to the EU because of farm protectionism. It's not because of "bacteria" in our food, but because some of it is GMO, which Euro hippie moms won't accept, giving EU's farm lobby an additional excuse for protectionism.
But that's all beside the point, because we're talking about medicine, not food. None of the major countries allows germy drugs, and genetic engineering is a standard technique in many advanced new drugs coming from all these countries. Look at the new custom
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There's no venue-shopping problem if multinational testing takes place according to an international agreement. And we can assume that any compound tested overseas will be patented there too, so I don't see any change in patenting except that our FDA process, the one US manufacturers will be using to establish patent, will, freed of all that duplicate effort, be faster.
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lolz, the software the least of our worries (Score:4, Interesting)
big insurance, big pharmy, big healthcare chains... all have our lawmakers and the industry in their pockets and under their control. It's why "obamacare" doesn't have a single payer system and why it's therefore just a warmed over Republican plan.
It's out of control, the insurance companies and the healthcare directors (with biz degrees) practice medicine and the doctors don't
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"Romney invented Obamacare"
Yeah, I said it was a watered-down Republican plan, also it had 188 Republican amendments to it.
You're the dipshit, pay attention
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You act like that was a bad thing.
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Obamacare doesn't have single payer for two reasons:
1) When Obamacare was passed the economy was in a deep recession. Going single payer would put a couple million more people out of work; even Nancy Pelosi knew better than to do that.
2) Single payer (or Medicare for All) is a stupid and cowardly way of trying to bankrupt the private system so the government is forced to take it over. If you're going to socialize healthcare, eliminate private healthcare providers and make everything part of a national healt
Only one thing better than open source... (Score:2)
And that's PUBLIC DOMAIN, as in.... AFTER THE PATENT EXPIRES.
Damn people are dumb.
Taxpayer funded, no commercial nor political (GPL) (Score:3)
Here's what I do know: Open source and data produces better results than proprietary methods. In technology, the field I know best, almost every company -- including open source poster-child enemy Microsoft -- has embraced open source. Why? Because it works better than the short-sighted proprietary approaches.
Then you do not know as much as you think. Open source works well for commodities that have little to no opportunity for profits. Embedded firmware that boots the system and hosts an environment or specialized application (phones, appliances, iot devices), and server operating systems. Historically the taxpayer funded BSD Unix undercut commercial efforts in these areas (various Unix Workstation/Server vendors based their environments on BSD), Linux followed, more on this below..
How does open source work better when it is largely copying commercial software (or in the Linux case copying other open source for political reasons)? LibreOffice, Gimp, etc are basically copies of commercial software, Linux a copy of BSD and AT&T Unix, etc. Copies in the sense of copying features and functionality, of course the source code is not copied. The vast majority of the time open source follows commercial, it does not lead.
Not all proprietary software is based on short term thinking or short sighted approaches, and open source is hardly devoid of those two shortcomings either. Its a human failing, not a software development approach failing, not a licensing failing. You are offering articles of faith as if they were established facts.
As for Microsoft's embrace of open source. Like Apple, some things can be outsourced to the "community". With respect to Microsoft including the Linux kernel in Windows, offering the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), this greatly undercuts Linux's attempt to gain traction on the desktop. Many Linux users just want some Unix tools and utilities. WSL makes these available natively on the Windows desktop, available alongside all that commercial proprietary software people just can't do without. Thereby reducing interest in Linux, as macOS had reduced interest in Linux with its native BSD environment. In the 1990s Linux was a godsend for someone wanting Unix on a PC, but now its just not that special. Microsoft was not so short sighted here were they?
That said, for things that are taxpayers funded. Yes they should be under a non-discriminatory non-political open source license like BSD and a few others, GPL fails here. Of course individuals and groups funding things on their own are free to do whatever they feel like doing, BSD, GPL, commercial, etc. But no, when appealing to the taxpayers you should not get to go commercial or political (GPL).
'Radical' or 'socialist'? (Score:2)
Promoting the concept of sharing will be tough. Sharing, however, is a difficult and somewhat scary idea to promote. It sounds suspiciously 'radical.'
Doesn't every country with a socialized medical system benefit from sharing when it comes to giving the taxpayer the biggest shot in the arm for the amount of money spent?
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You don't know a damn thing about how Republicans think. It's utterly ridiculous.
Should work ok, ouside the USA (Score:2)
Outside of the USA in counties where health care is operated on the basis of maximum patient health
Medicine is not software (Score:2)
There are a few important differences between open source software projects and medicine. Many of the most successful software projects have commercial backers who make money from selling stuff based on the software. With medicine, things are different since the medicine itself is the product. It is not as easy to build other profitable products or services around it that would be successful enough to finance open source development of the medicine itself. Doctors do not make more profits when medicines get
perverted (Score:2)
i have always found it perverted that there are companies who try to get the most amount of profit possible out of sick people/people who depend on medication to survive/stay alive.
if anything all pharmacutical companies should be non-profit.
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Software != Medicine (Score:2)
What Microsoft does not open are their profit drivers. Windows will not be open sourced. Office, closed. Azure, closed. Is it just Microsoft? Of course not. Apple has created open source software, like CUPS, but have they opened their source for iOS? Ma
Open Source licensure leaves you hanging. (Score:2)
I advocated for open source software when I was a sysadmin at the rocket ranch twenty years ago. But there is more to a manufacturing business (we made weapons) than just having the best tools in the hands of the sharpest minds on the planet. You have to have somebody you can hang if it all goes south. You don't get that with open source. We can (and did) sue IBM, Microsoft, Sun, and HP when their tools fail to work as advertised. Open source license agreements protect one thing -- access to the code