Replies to post #51296 on Biotech Values

[jbog]

Master, You bring up a very good point...

"""I saw one RS at a meeting declare that Lucentis will bankrupt medicare. he forgot to give the researchers their proper due for discovering the 1st drug to ever improve sight in AMD.""""

How do we value Lucentis. How should we value Avastin, Cetuximab or Vecitbix?

Should we pay what Genentech, Imclone or Amgen want? Just because someone discovers something should we give them a blank check? Of course if I made the best widget in the world I'd still have to price it accordingly but wait, Avastin's the only vegf antibody on the market and so is lucentis. So how much is right?

Should Avastin be twice as much as oxilaplatin, we both know that oxi is the workhorse in many chemo regimens. Oh, wait a minute, oxi cost 250 times 5fu but we also know oxi's useless without 5fu.

Hmmm, interesting problem. Maybe we should pay oddles for these drugs, but then should genetech pick up the bill for every bleeding episode, or imclone for every reaction. Hmmm

[drbio45]

I saw one RS at a meeting declare that Lucentis will bankrupt medicare. he forgot to give the researchers their proper due for discovering the 1st drug to ever improve sight in AMD.

you and most of the people on this board give Genentech too much credit for their technology and their ethics.

As far as lucentis they figured out a way to charge more for a drug (avastin) that is similar in efficacy. Not exactly ethical.

avastin. The drug was basically a failure but the NiH did studies that worked, after Genentech had pretty much given up on the drug after initially poor results.

Did genentech come out with idea to use avastin/lucentis for AMD or did they follow what Macugen had done, and say to themselves, wait a minute this crap on the shelf works the same way?