They have funded some important repurposed-drug studies for Huntingtons Disease, which runs in my family. For a disease like this, it's never going to make sense for major pharmaceutical companies to invest the effort to develop entirely new drugs, but by repurposing existing drugs, it gives people living with rare diseases a chance to ease symptoms.
This is ... not correct.
Roche, Regeneron, and Novartis all have novel HD drugs under development in tandem with smaller labs (Ionis, Alnylam, and PTC respectively), and then smaller labs like uniQure and Wave Life Sciences do too. Novartis have already dropped $1bn on the partnership with a committed $2b more. In addition, there are a bunch of incentive schemes for diseases like HD: both the FDA and EMA have offered orphan-drug designation to therapies for HD, the FDA does expedited programmes and can offer RMAT designation for drugs like AMT-130.
Exciting stuff, if it gets FDA approved.
This means such studies can give more clarity on which off-label use is beneficial but it can't be an officially allowed usage.
E.g. gabapentin is an anti-seizure medication that has been found to reduce neuropathic pain as well. It has shot up to the 5th most prescribed medication in the last decade as it has replaced long-term opioid use for new chronic neuropathic pain patients. This is 100% off-label and is prescribed by everyone from NPs all the way up to neurosurgeons for this purpose.
I’ve never been asked to sign a waiver and I can’t imagine that for-profit hospitals would allow their doctors to prescribe off-label medications willy-nilly if they represented big liability. (I don’t know this for sure, this is just what my experience implies.)
This isn’t a new or novel concept. Doctors manage patients with off-label prescriptions all day long.
I’ve had ME/CFS my whole life but the third covid vaccine shot sent me to new lows, to the point LDN just wasn’t cutting it anymore. These days I take a combo of modafinil in the morning and amitryptiline at night. And low dose ozempic has been super helpful as well. I was researching GLP1As prior to the current craze because I was worried about hyper sensitivity so I waited for more data before trying, I started at 1/100th the normal starting dose and still got temporary gastroparesis. These days I take a more regular dose of 1mg/wk but it also seems that my body has largely normalized as the hypersensitivities have worn off. Probably a good sign that I’ve successfully addressed actual deficiencies.
Doctors here are allowed to prescribe them though.
I’m in the US. This is not true.
Insurance will have prior authorization rules for certain drugs that are expensive that require the doctor to submit documentation of the condition, but in most cases the common medication is simply covered if prescribed. The insurance company does not receive documentation of every condition for every prescription to determine if the prescription is on label or off label.
Insurance companies can and do also support some off label treatments that are commonly used under their prior auth requirements.
I don’t know why there are so many comments in this thread making confident assertions that off label prescribing or insurance or so uncommon. This happens all day long at doctors offices and pharmacies.
This is not true
> insurance typically won't cover off label use
Generally not true but it can be the case, especially for expensive medications
https://www.drugpatentwatch.com/blog/patenting-new-uses-for-...
From:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9336118/
"COM claims can be difficult to gain for repurposed compounds, as the patentee must somehow differentiate their patent claims over what is in the public domain and present data that the drug is a credible candidate for the new indication [41, 42]."
citing
You can read a lot of published papers on PubMed by searching for a condition or drug. You should be aware that there are a lot of papers published that say disease A can be treated with drug or supplement B that fail to replicate if anyone else tries it. It takes some practice to recognize when a treatment represents a real trend as opposed to a single quack doctor looking for a status boosting publication with some questionable claims.
You can also search here: https://clinicaltrials.gov/
I was a clinical trial participant once and it was a positive experience for me.
there is absolutely no cure for certain types of long-covid and me-cfs right now
no repurposing any drug is going to cure it, they've tried everything after six years
it will take a decade to have anything even in the pipeline and won't emerge from the USA because all medical and science research investment by the government has been destroyed by Russell Vought and Heritage Foundation
JAK-STAT inhibitors will be a big treatment, not a cure, but they cost thousands per month in the USA because generics aren't allowed
A pure capitalistic society works on assumptions that are not real. People are often cheaters. This would have to be taken into account. But when you have an orange Al Capone in charge, it is pillage day. Even before the orange King you had heavily overcharged prices in the health care system. You need to realise that you have a mafia in charge that does not want to change this system. Why kill the cow that you can milk for free?
No it doesn't. This is silly.
Drug prices in the US are high for non-generic drugs because patent law gives the patent holder an artificial government-granted monopoly, which is blatantly not "pure" or "maximum capitalistic".
Generic drugs - where the free market does apply - in the US are as cheap or cheaper than in other countries. See [0]:
U.S. prices for brand-name originator drugs were 422 percent of prices in
comparison countries, while U.S. unbranded generics, which we found account for 90
percent of U.S. prescription volume, were on average cheaper at 67 percent of
prices in comparison countries, where on average only 41 percent of prescription
volume is for unbranded generics.
Because you are both absolutely right.
I don’t know why you think this. The US is not a maximally capitalist society. The reason drug prices are so high is due to regulations restriction who can manufacture them due to government-granted temporary monopolies through patent law.
If the US was maximally capitalist it would be a free for all with no patent protection.
If we had proper competition and price discovery, things would be much better.