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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Steve Lokness who wrote (116030)	7/21/2009 1:52:45 PM
From: Cogito	Respond to of 541957

>>Darn. I have to go and would like to spend more time on a reply. Biotechs for the most part are huge drains of cash - from investors. Only occasionally does one make it big and reward investors and scientist alike. If the government takes this over, government would also have to fuel these huge cash drains that just gobble up feroucious amounts of cash through all the failures. In investor land those investors get nothing. I have held several biotechs that have gone away to biotech heaven. the number of new cancer cases annually in the US is over a million and a half. Yes of course, but there are a bunch of different cancers and different therapies for each one. Even in the same cancer - different people need different drugs or therapies. Personalized medicines if you will. Huge HUGE new potential for cures.<< Steve - My idea, at least after I thought about it, was to have the government provide the rewards to the little biotechs who come up with the goods, but let private investors take the risk of funding the research in the first place. Like a state-run lottery for medical research. Such a system would give those companies a different motivational slant, since the biggest rewards would come from producing effective treatments that are also inexpensive. FYI, for most forms of cancer, there is a single, standard treatment protocol. For the cancer I had, as an example, chemotherapy with FOLFOX is pretty much the only option, with or without Avastin added on. There are more than a hundred thousand new cases of colorectal cancer each year in the US, and the majority of the people who have it will get the FOLFOX regimen - Folinic acid, Fluorouracil, and Oxaliplatin. - Allen