Qproof 694: “What if cures already exist?”
This Washington Post article out today only partially exposes the “white coat psychopaths” in Big Pharma. It’s or obably a well thought out PR spin move since they don’t go deep enough.
It’s one thing to run the business models and opt out of repurposing your drug for a new indication because the ROI is not there, but to outright lie about and/or ignore the striking off label data is inexcusable.
Bottom line is this: Pfizer couldn’t get any of their in-house developed blockbuster drugs FDA approved for Alzheimers and refused to admit that their soon to be generic works off label by perispinal injection to rapidly alleviate Alzheimer’s symptoms, so they just laid off their entire CNS division?!? Boo hoo! These people make me sick. For example, this quote from the article is an outright lie!
“But none of the experts interviewed for this story said such “off-label’’ use of Enbrel would be appropriate for Alzheimer’s, because of the very limited nature of the data thus far. Nor, they said, do they believe such prescribing is happening to any significant extent.”
Bullshit!!! Life extension foundation wrote articles about how well this drug works by perispinal injection back in 2007-2008? and I believe even independently funded a small clinical trial themselves. If you have the $$$, you can hire a certified neurologist to give you the Embrel by perispinal injection off label for Alzheimer’s, TBI, and other neurodegenerative diseases, but you will never see FDA approval of it for any of theses conditions even if it’s therapeutic effects come closest to being “disease modifying.” No, big pharma is banking on some new highly expensive “blockbuster” or nothing at all just to keep the whole stinking establishment up and running.
Read this excerpt from just published commentary in Expert Review of Neurotherapeutics Volume 19, 2019
“The potential of treating these disease states by neutralizing excessive cerebral levels of TNF is undoubtedly enormous. In this commercial age, however, conflict arises. Those with an ultimate research goal of helping as many patients as possible look benignly on an example of drug re-purposing provided by injecting etanercept, an anti-TNF biological with many FDA-approved clinical applications by a novel route of administration. This appears to have stopped, in numerous patients, many post-stroke and post-TBI sequelae in their tracks but has never attracted backers willing to fund a controlled trial, except recently the Australian Government. This research direction has continued for almost a decade, and includes, in principle, the thalidomide analogues and XPro1595, a double negative rTNF. It has to be said that the pharmaceutical companies selling etanercept, which is financially threatened by biosimilars, refused engagement very early on. Clearly, times are very less patient-orientated than a couple of decades ago. In 1993, on being advised of success with infliximab, the first of anti-TNF biologicals, in open studies for rheumatoid arthritis, the company that owns this agent funded a controlled trial, run in conjunction with the originators of the concept. This reported a positive Phase III outcome within a year. Nowadays, times are such that the parent body of the US medical specialists who collaborate with pharmaceutical companies to research neurodegenerative disease have never to date, 13 years after the first open trial, even consented to witness the perispinal injection procedure or its clinical outcome. Evidently, they see drug repurposing as an anathema to novel patent-driven research funding and financial success. Thus, they have put themselves in a position, presumably rational from their perspective, of actively trying to stop something they have never seen, and indeed very rarely acknowledge exists. Indeed, the court case they initiated to stop it being used off-label not only failed to do so, but actually gave its use legal encouragement. In contrast to neurologists, independent neuroscientists, often following their own leads, observe and quote this work while building on it. Already perispinal etanercept outcomes are raising interesting and useful scientific questions, such as how it acts so quickly, how it can be useful so long after the stroke or TBI episode, and how its effects last for so long. These are real outcomes seen in thousands of cases, and measurable by any witness with a timepiece.”
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14737175.2019.1618710