1. OK. Cancer is an interesting one. Oncology is what we call it. I'll share some bits and pieces on info that I was involved in.
2. The most interesting aspect of oncology is that it is the fastest growing and most lucrative therapeutic class right next to immunology.
3. I was part of a global pricing and research team once to determine the most optimal price for a cancer drug many years ago. So, what is the meaning of "most optimal"
4. Many people would think, most optimal means that it is most affordable for patients. That's not the case. Cancer drugs are usually measured in something called "Progression-free survival".
5. For example, if you have a specific type of cancer (depending on the stage of the cancer etc), we have studies that show how long a person can survive on average, this is why sometimes a doctor can tell patients stuff like ... "you have 6 months left etc etc"
6. Progression free survival (PFS) basically means, if you take the drug, how long can it extend your life. So for example, if you don't take it, you'll live 6 months. If you take it, you extend it to 15 months... so you get 9 extra months to live.
7. The rule of thumb to conduct pricing is this, for the extra 9 months to live, how much are you willing to pay and afford based on your demographic etc? 50k per month? 100k per month? We do all kinds of modelling to find the optimal profit point.
8. Of course, based on the profit point, we assign some percentage to marketing, usually between 20-30%. So for example, if the drug is expected to pull in 5 billion per year, we use 1-2 billion dollars for marketing.
9. Marketing comes in various forms... too many to speak off. But for cancer drugs sometimes we use marketing $$$ to give "free drugs" to the poorest so we can create a narrative that we are doing corporate social responsibilities like helping communities etc
10. of course everything is paid for by the revenue we earn. The cost of the drug varies. For small molecules (small molecules are like pills), it costs like a few cents to a few dollars (depending on how much we manufacture),
11. but the patients pay 10k-50k etc depending on how long they want to live. For large molecules (biologic drugs), they are harder to manufacture - they cost a lot more than small molecules - sometimes in hundreds of $. of course we still make a profit if we sell them for 10k.
12. another thing i find fascinating about cancer is how prevalent it is. 15 years ago, around 1 in 4 people will die because of cancer. today it is around 1 in 3 people. Hundred years ago it was like 1 in 100. im not gonna cite studies for any trolls, these are common knowledge
13. many reasons why - the food that we consume mainly, glyphosates (do your own research), maybe childhood vaccines (do your own research).
14. Another interesting fact is there are a lot of natural remedies for cancer (but also a LOT of fake stuffs because people wanna profit from both sides). Some of the real natural remedies for cancer - fasting and keto diet is one.
15. there not much study on it because it is not profitable for Pharma to sponsor such studies (90% of all university research are from pharma). Here's the premise if you look it up. Basically most cancer cells are metabolically inflexible.
16. what is the meaning of metabolic flexibility? The healthy cells in our body uses energy from carb, protein or fats. Its called metabolically flexible because you can train them to consume various types of energy sources.
17. Majority of cancer cells however, are metabolically inflexible, they can only derive energy from sugar (carbs). that is why, when you do a keto diet, you tend to starve off cancer cells. Many surgeons know this thats why they recommend keto diet prior to surgery if....
18.. if a tumour is too large. Second thing is fasting - it triggers a process called "autophagy" in our body. Basically when you stop eating for 16 hours, autophagy kicks in and your body starts to consume itself. It starts by eating off the older cells or the more diseased cell
19. such as cancer etc thats why it helps in preventing cancer. anyway these are topics that many good doctors talk about but there are no money to be made for pharma thats why you don't hear them from the news.
20. retweet and like if this helps!
21. if you wanna know anything about Pharma post it on this thread and I will respond to you
22. Some dumbfuck showed me prevalence of cancer decreasing in the US using CDC data. I worked globally - we dont just see US data which represents 4.25% of the world when talking about prevalence esp its skewed due to high medical accessibility / advancements
23. This is how dumbfucks operate. thats why i need to hide and block their reply.
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