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"i know a couple of researchers who work on cancer treatment drugs for a major pharmaceutical corporations. i also know academic researchers.
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I think you need to ask your academic researcher friends about this. I'm certain they will explain to that there is a much more aggressive attitide in the field toward privately funded studies.
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there is a considerable amount of information sharing, such that it becomes really quite difficult to say where the particular logics that researchers pursue come from--private? public? both at once?....private firms are more likely to consider important research proprietary and therefore do not share the information...which would seem a problem in the arena of socientific research, wouldnt it?
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Private firms are testing THIER drug; therefore, there isn't any reason to share the information - noone else will be testing it, because noone else knows the formula. If it dies in the first phase of it's trials, then it goes no further. Nobody recreates the problem at the molecular level (the pharmacokinetics of any drug are well documented in any protocol written to test that drug, and to get this past investigator's whove worked run countless drug company studies, an internal review board, the drug companies own review process - is next to impossible). side note - look at all the MAJOR mistakes that have resulted in the death of a research subject - you'd be hard pressed to find one that occured on an industry sponsored trial - they're almost exclusively internal federally funded studies (or cases where the site running the trial didn't follow the protocol as written).
In the event that it becomes approved by the FDA, and an academic investigator would like to try it on another indication, they are required to publish the results, negative or positive - because at this point, it is a drug available to the public, who's side effects are well known, and the results are scientifically valid negative or positive.
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particularly given that the private-firm research leans on academic research, track of which is given in publications--and behind that lay state funding, the whole tangle of grants, university funding, etc etc etc,[/
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There is next to no state funding (in fact i've never heard of it), same for universities - acedemic hospitals rely almost solely on federal funding and (don't say it) pharmaceutical trials.
I work in radiation oncology at one of the largest academic cancer research institutions in the country (rated #1 for however many years - thanks to yours truly). In a nutshell, from first hand experience, among academic investigators, there is much more excitement in privately sponsored trials. In fact, until we found a director who realized that - NCI sponsored cooperative group trials almost shut us down.
I'm dying to hear anything the goverment has done better than private industry, but cancer research just isn't it.
....time to go smoke another cigarette and drink another beer.