Now is the time to act to fix health care reform. The lobbyists are out in full force to control the agenda, as reported in the New York Times In House, Many Spoke With One Voice: Lobbyists’, and to write into law 12 plus years of monopoly pricing (in addition to patent protected pricing) for the benefit of commercial stage pharmaceutical companies.
The effect of this law will be to deprive our research companies of future funding and discourage science driven innovation as profits will now be dependent on getting a new product approved, rather than on discovering a patentable new cure for diabetes, Alzheimers, cancer etc. See Where have all the progressives gone on the biologics provisions in Health Care Reform?.
You can do something. Go to BioGenerics Get the Facts and get armed. Then Sign the Petition
If we do not fund our future, we will lose great jobs in Massachusetts and the global lead we have in biotechnology.
If you want to see how the lobbyists are shaping the debate, look at but one more example — the leading questions in the survey they sent to our Senate candidates and their answers.Senate Candidate Reponses.
can you please email me offline? david at bluemassgroup dot com.
What are Biogenerics?
So there’s your basic pharmaceutical medications, which usually show up on the scene as brand-name products (e.g. Prozac) and sometimes later have a far cheaper generic form released (e.g. fluoxetine).
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p>Then there’s a class of treatments called biologics, which are made from – wait for it – biological material. I’m not sure if this includes things like insulin – maybe someone else knows? – but it does include things like the injectable treatment Enbrel that’s used for arthritis (and incidentally comes from Chinese hamster ovaries. Totally not making that up). It also includes many if not all of the disease-modifying treatments for MS, which are CRAZY expensive (I mean like $10k per infusion expensive).
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p>Biogenerics are the generic forms of those biologically-based medical treatments. Patient advocates want them released (what with not everyone having $10k to drop every month and all); biotech firms say you can’t make generics of biological products the same way you can with “regular” drugs.
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p>Does that help?
some used in cancer treatment.
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p>Rep Eschoo has been instrumental in getting this class of drugs extended patent rights that are anti-competitive and drive up costs for patients… to the best of my knowledge
They’re not jobs that benefit us, they’re the jobs that result in extra traffic down Mass Ave that makes it take an hour to get through Porter Square. I bet ninety percent of them go to foreigners. I think living in Massachusetts will be much more pleasurable if we drive the biotech companies out, they are leeching off of us. They’re the main reason health insurance premiums have doubled. Have they improved life expectancy, or made life better for everyone? No, everyone still dies around the same time, but now we are all anxious and fret about this or that drug that we should be taking. It’s a racket!
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p>Our future will arrive whether we fund biogenerics or not, time doesn’t require funding to transpire. I say let the private sector invest in drugs, and then if they come up with something good, take it my eminent domain, as a matter of social justice.
I never write joke posts, David. My Plan for the Beatles is serious too.
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p>Seriously, I say screw those jobs.
Eastern Europe. Please explain the other two.
It’s American Sign Language for W.T.F.
Are the signs given in sequence, left to right? Some people equate giving the fig to giving the finger, but it is not as strong, shown by the fact that giving the finger has become very popular in Russia and Eastern Europe to express total disdain. Huh, I am guessing, does WTF mean “What the f…”?
http://www.handspeak.com/spell…
What you call “the fig” is an ASL letter “T”, BTW.
:WTF also refers to World Time Format, a new internet standard for referring to the same point in time all over the world, or on the internet. It is Alphabetic, 26 “hours” in a day, 26 “minutes” in an “hour”, and so on. “:A” is Noon in Greenwich England, but “:A” occurs at 7:00 AM here (it doesn’t change with Daylight Savings, so it is sometimes 8:00 AM here).
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p>A and N are the only hours that line up with a 24 hour clock, because Alphabetic Hours are only about 55 minutes long. For example, 9:00 AM is not :C (that’s 08:50:46), but :B
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p>A guy developed it at the Diesel Cafe and posted a link to his AlphabetClock.com site on the Diesel’s wifi bulletin board. I got really into the idea and re-wrote the code to be more efficient and added microseconds, and then I converted it to use the Julian Day which is a standard time format used in SQLite and other databases, which results in my version being 12 hours off from his original version, but I think that’s better (especially for us, since A is at 8AM at the start of the day here, instead of at 8PM). Then I recognized the guy from his picture on the Diesel board and showed him my code, which he was impressed by, but I may have offended him a little bit, or discouraged him. He has said he agrees to incorporate my code and that we should should flip it 12 hours to use the Julian Day, but he hasn’t had time to do it yet. I hope we get them in sync so we can move on to pushing the standard. It’s also a very compact way to transmit the date and time in JSON or XML data.
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p>I put my version up here, to show you guys, but his version is still the official version, since he invented it. Oh yeah, my version has the full Julian Day, not just the time. So you can refer to any event in history or in the future with :WTF
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p>For example, John Lennon was pronounced dead at 10:45pm on December 8, 1980 in New York City. That was FJCGK:RBQ in :WTF
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p>If you want to meet on the internet for a game of live chess tomorrow at 9:00 PM, that’s FJRXD:QGN (The FJ can be left off, it won’t roll over to FK til 2024)
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p>Cool huh?
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p>It’s a really good standard, and there’d be two extra hours in a day to get more done. I think the Federal Goverment should start scheduling meetings and speeches in WTF, adapting to its 55 minute hours, to have space for two more hour long meetings in a day. We’d have a staff meeting as :D, lunch at :E (or at :EAT), etc.
here
Or is it only the nasty brown foreigners you object to? I’d take that bet of yours, btw, since my experience is your 90% estimate is as divorced from reality as the rest of your post.
Whether they’re to Americans from other states, or to Chinese or Indian researchers or other foreigners, including people from England, Ireland, etc, it doesn’t really matter. I’d be surprised if more than 10% of biotech jobs (not including the security desk and janitor) went to people actually from Massachusetts.
Biologics are great treatments for people with a variety of diseases. The development of these “drugs” take as long if not longer than small molecule drugs and even more innovations required. We need to entice large pharma to get more into biologics so please don’t start to reduce he business case for them to put money into it.
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p>Our economy has been sucking wind and MA has been avoiding the worst of it thanks to these biotechs. Genzyme’s a great local company employing 11,000 worldwide with many of them here in MA. The company’s products and services are focused on rare inherited disorders, kidney disease, orthopaedics, cancer, transplant and immune disease… (from their website). They are deeply into biologics hurting them will hurt not only the MA employment scene but the R&D for the next biologic to cure something else.
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p>Bad idea!
Bleicher is advocating recognizing reality and taking action, not declaring anyone evil.
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p>Why do yo have to reduce everything to the dumbest, nastiest argument possible?
nuance is not an option
I am advocating for a future for the biotechnology industry. The reason we have succeeded so far is our focus on science and scientific innovation. If we pass the law as currently crafted, we will increase profits for a few of the companies in the short term, but we will change the competitive nature of the industry. Rather than asking investors to risk investment on products that advance science and cure unmet medical needs, we will now be asking investors and biotech companies to focus on what gets a product approved faster so they can get 12 years exclusivity. Because the exclusivity would be independent of any innovation or new cure, it could simply be a 4th or 4th version of an existing therapy, it would stop innovation.
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p>We have been successful competitors because we are great at science and innovation. If we lose the funding for this activity, great companies like Genzyme might be forced to stop innovating to be profitable, and smaller companies would likely lose their sources of capital as venture capitalists place their bets on lower risk,higher reward options.