BEG
Senior Member
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- 1,032
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- Southeast US
I don't know the exact facts but in my eyes it's very easy to blame a company for not doing some huge phase III trials. Do you know how expensive these trials are? You pay about 10,000 to 20,000 dollar per patient. Now multiply by 1000 patients. Who can afford this? Thousands of promising drugs are stuck after Phase II because the companies cannot afford to do Phase III trials. It would be the same, if you only allowed Premium cars on the roads because they have better safety records of whatever. It should be the patients choice, what he or she buys. Drugs that finish Phase II are safe, otherwise they wouldn't have finished, so why can't we buy them? The Phase III requirement is one of the biggest innovation destroyers on earth. Government wastes billions of dollars on all kinds of things, so when it requires Phase III after successful completion of Phase II, it should also pay for it or let patients decide, if they buy a drug or not.
Bold is mine. Waverunner, you appear to be in the know about this sort of thing and it bears repeating. Over the last two years, I've watched my husband and a small team bring a patented product to market. For phases I and II, the money came out of their own pockets. The costs, however, for 3 trials in the phase III trial were obscenely exorbitant. Fortunately, a large pharmaceutical company got involved, put up the money, and they are now in trial #3 of Phase III. Without that money from the drug company, obviously this innovation would have been dead in its tracks.
There seem to be other options for ampligen, so maybe there is hope. It seems that's what sustains us.