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Biotech / Medical : Techniclone (TCLN) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: EZLibra who wrote (981)	12/31/1997 8:53:00 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 3702

"...use limited resources on individuals". Oh, no! Even the people doing the research are thinking there are limited resources. So they are treating people like cattle. "Roll up, roll up. We don't care what your specific problem is, we have here a bucketful of British Standard Treatment. Some of you will be lucky. Bad luck for the rest of you". Virtually everyone in the business uses this method now? Hell's teeth, what a mess. No wonder dead people are strewn from here to kingdom come. But what an opportunity for a company which actually cares whether people live or die, suffer or don't. Who will buy the Oncolym, Rituxan, or cyclophosphamide cross-your-fingers-and-hope products if they can get a targeted, guaranteed bullseye approach to the specific problem that a particular individual has? There are not limited resources. There are for some individuals and you could say almost whole countries. But the money that would be available if the right approach was taken is in the multibillions. If you offer somebody a guaranteed cancer cure, they will, on average, be able to come up with hundreds of thousands of dollars - basically the economic value of that individual. So the average Rwandan is in big trouble. Same for the average Indian. Same for the average uninsured American. But there are heaps of people with money available. It is not true to say that resources are limited. They are simply wasted or spent elsewhere. If Dr Epstein has the antibody which will save somebody in his freezer and the person dies because of "lack of resources", that is mismanagement, not a lack of resources. I've got a big stack of cash available to the person who bothers getting the right stuff out of their freezer. If they leave it in the freezer, the people who could benefit will die, I'll have to put the money into sherry drinking, CO2 pollution from 747 travel or the like, and Epstein can get a job cleaning the aircraft out. Hardly the best outcome for any of us. The FDA must have some interesting discussion about this. They approved Rituxan for low grade only. As though it is accurately targeted there. In fact it might as well be used anywhere CD20 lives. They are doing the opposite of what you say. With Affymetrix testing becoming available, better targeting will be cheaper. More people can have their specific problem solved. No more blind blasting. Time and money? Money is more or less unlimited. Time is not. People want the products, they have the money, they don't have the time. I suppose the expression 'either piss or get off the pot' is appropriate for the management of Techniclone if they are sitting on a freezer full of Crown Jewels. The concepts of grade and stage seem archaic. With the technology available, the talk should be of genes, cell design, antigens and all that stuff. Microscopes and drilling holes in bone, toxic chemicals and the like belong in the Smithsonian. 1998 is already well underway here. End of day one approaching. Not that I'm impatient or anything. Maurice