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Gates thinks it is “ironic” that vaccines have done so well, along with AIDS drugs that have been a boon to companies like Gilead, one of the biggest biotechnology companies, and Merck, while heartburn medicines, cholesterol drugs, and antidepressants have failed to pay off.
When it comes to cancer drugs like Avastin and Erbitux, some of the biggest sales successes of the past decade, Gates seems unimpressed. “There’s always this divergence between what’s financially attractive and what has dramatic profit and the number of life years that you really save.” Take for instance, Novartis’ Gleevec, the crown jewel of targeted cancer drugs that can put chronic myelogenous leukemia and gastrointestinal stromal tumors into remission. “Do the math on that versus, says, preventing Parkinson’s or preventing Alzheimer’s. It’s in a different universe.”
The good news, to Gates’ mind, is that right now people are making money in the vaccine business. That means that more research is getting funded, and more innovation is happening.
“The rich world companies do more,” he says, “and that means the Chinese and Indian companies see that and they do more. You know, so it’s a pretty good virtuous cycle right now in terms of focus on vaccines. ”
Part of the drug industry’s problem, though, is that the process of inventing new drugs and vaccines has gotten more complex. Forty years ago, Leo Sternbach, a Roche scientist, could invent whole swaths of anti-anxiety drugs, and Merck vaccine researcher Maurice Hilleman, one of Gates’ heroes, could develop the bulk of the vaccines still given to children today.
“It’s like the breadth of software I got to do at Microsoft,” says Gates. “Things become more specialized and, you know, and more complex. So the idea that one guy does, like, ten different vaccines, including multiple iterations of them. And the combinations of them. He was on a roll. He got Merck into that. He figured out how it worked. He had the guts to go and try things.”
“It’s like the breadth of software I got to do at Microsoft,” says Gates. “Things become more specialized and, you know, and more complex. So the idea that one guy does, like, ten different vaccines, including multiple iterations of them. And the combinations of them. He was on a roll. He got Merck into that. He figured out how it worked. He had the guts to go and try things.”
The sad reality: as innovation piles on innovation, doing something new and different only gets harder.
source: forbes.com
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