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Biotech / Medical : VVUS: VIVUS INC. (NASDAQ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tunica Albuginea who wrote (6259)	3/29/1998 6:16:00 PM
From: LoLoLoLita	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 23519

TA, Welcome Back! I'm very interested in your information on the placebo effect. Could there be profit-making potential in this avenue of therapeutics? Maybe not at the current state-of-art, but everything can be improved with further research. For example, consider that findings of 10-30% placebo-response rates in a population ignore the fact that some people respond better to placebo than others. Perhaps if we can identify what types of individuals with various ailments respond best to placebo, targeted marketing efforts could be used so that placebo remedies are only sold to those for whom they will do the most good, and the least harm. The latter point raises the question of side-effect incidence from placebos. I have yet to see good data showing the incidence of side effects caused by placebo, but I suspect that it is relatively low. This could be of great benefit to the "bottom line" since insurance carriers could probably be convinced to offer lower rates for product-liability insurance on a placebo agent. And there is more. The therapeutic efficacy of placebo (as well as the side effect profile) might differ according to the type of placebo and its mode of administration. For example, does anyone really know for sure if injecting a placebo is more effective than swallowing a pill or putting an ointment on the skin? Of course, the experimental design of this study would need to be quite sophisticated in order to separate out the placebo's therapeutic response from the varying sensitivity of individuals to injectables, oral tablets, and whatever "neutral" carrier materials are used to construct the placebo. Further, just looking at tablets, how much correlation with therapeutic efficacy is there with the tablet's size, shape, and color? Someone could devote an entire lifetime to this important new field of research! And, if sufficient regard is given to the "letter of the law" and precedents established by past FDA approvals, I feel very confident that a new placebo drug can be brought to market, and the potential profits are beyond imagining. If the product development effort is conducted in close coordination with the crucial marketing and legal research efforts, I can see an entire product line, with remedies for a wide assortment of ailments. This would make Viagra's estimated billions and billions of sales pale in comparison. Cheers, David