It's easy to give up on Hemispherx Biopharma (
HEB) and its flagship drug Ampligen. The Street's Adam Feuerstein has done a good job trashing the company and the drug. Initially, I wasn't very impressed either, but then I read many accounts of patients who took the drug and raved about how Ampligen greatly changed their quality of life.
Ampligen (rintatolimod) (poly C12u), is an experimental
immunomodulatory double stranded RNA drug developed by
Hemispherx Biopharma of
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Ampligen is a toll-like receptor 3 (TLR3) antagonist based on synthetic double stranded RNA (dsRNA). Although chronic fatigue syndrome/myalgic encephalomyelitis (CFS/ME) is the main indication for this drug, Ampligen is also in early clinical trials as a vaccine adjuvant for breast and ovarian cancers and influenza.
There is a real need to find a drug that treats CFS/ME. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than one million Americans have CFS/ME. Others estimate that the CFS population is closer to four million adults in the United States, a number that is 10 times larger than that of multiple sclerosis (400,000), a condition with similar functional impairment, also of unknown etiology, but with nine FDA approved disease modifying agents. CFS/ME strikes more people in the United States than multiple sclerosis, lupus, and many forms of cancer.
Some research has estimated that 14.3% of CFS/ME sufferers have severe disease. Such patients are house-ridden, bed-ridden and when ambulatory may need to be in a wheelchair. CDC studies have shown that CFS can be as debilitating as multiple sclerosis, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, heart disease, end-stage renal disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and similar chronic conditions.
The more severely ill patients die prematurely, often from organ failure, cancer and heart disease or suicide. Recently, the CDC and Harvard School of Public Health published an analysis based on a group of patients in Georgia. They calculated the economic burden for a CFS/ME sufferer both in terms of additional healthcare expenditures and lost earnings that they estimated at $11,780 per year per person. If it is assumed that the CFS patient population that is currently under care was one million, then the annual cost to society would be $11.8 billion. The full cost assuming four million CFS sufferers would be $47.1 billion per year...