What the Alternative Medicine Prize Tells Us About Big Pharma

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But to be sustainable, this tightrope model must constantly find a balance between the income needed to keep the activity going and the creative freedom needed to add value to it. It runs a tightrope with quick profits on one side and losing the formatting race on the other. This is what makes it difficult to use in highly regulated areas such as health.

Eroom’s law gives weight to pharma

However, necessity is law. This week I attended the Life Sciences CEO Forum, a large gathering of biotech and pharmaceutical company bosses in Zurich. They suffer from the opposite of Moore’s Law which drives digital profits (always more computing power at a lower cost). It’s called Eroom’s Law (Moore spelled backwards). She notes that every nine years, the number of new approved drugs halves, while the cost of developing them doubles.

Because they have patients to treat every day, more and more doctors are turning to therapies other than Big Pharma. For example, they are interested in our diverse microbiota. For brain diseases, the use of micro-dosed recreational drugs such as psilocybin or LSD gives surprising results, as explained in our exploration “I tried psychedelics for my treatment”. These substances, which are still illegal, are no longer prohibited; Hospitals are running major clinical trials, but there is a long waiting list to participate at HUG in Geneva.

In the field of infectious diseases, it is phages that are on the rise, a therapy that left the Western arsenal in the 1960s but which continues to develop on the other side of the Iron Curtain, and especially in Georgia, as another said. Exploration of Heidi.News: Antibiotics: Phages strike back. This week, this is evidenced by the award of the Lennards Prize for the project of Angela Koutsokera, a CHUV pulmonologist, who wants to treat her antibiotic-resistant patients with these phages.

It must be said that resistance to antibiotics, increased by excessive use in both humans and farm animals, may become one of the main causes of mortality in 2050, with 10 million deaths per year. So phage therapy is something of a miracle. Phages are viruses that attack and destroy bacteria and are especially found in wastewater. This drug would be an almost natural way to deal with the rise of antibiotic resistance.

Science is not just about coincidences

However, unlike the snake oil salesmen and their influencers who abound on social media, doctors cannot be satisfied with happy coincidences. Although it can sometimes be effective, the use of phages does not work every time. First comes the difficulty of matching the right phage (there are billions in the environment) with the right strain of bacteria (also very numerous and, what’s more, adaptable). Then, even if these steps work initially, the patient may develop immunity to this foreign virus.

These obstacles largely explain why the pharmaceutical industry is not interested in phage therapy. We cannot patent a therapy that must be developed for each patient, so there is no economic model. In university research it is different, if you organize things rationally, ie scientifically.

This is where this alternative medicine meets science. Angela Koutsokera’s project is thus organized around different partnerships. For him, the most urgent thing is to provide a solution for his patients suffering from cystic fibrosis. “Their lungs sometimes become exhausted from repeated infections of the bacillus (Pseudomonas) which became resistant to antibioticsShe said that.

Phage and organoid libraries

To tackle this problem that posed a fatal risk to his patients, his project first relied on the phage library created by Gregory Resch at CHUV, which itself expanded to other phage libraries appearing in France as in the United States or Australia. It is in these libraries that the stages corresponding to the appropriate strain of bacillus are identified.

To go further, and because these bacteria create an environment that protects them from phages, a collaboration with the laboratory of Alexandre Perset at EPFL was established. It creates very advanced tools in today’s biomedical research: organoids, in other words, small models of organs (here lungs), to test phages. “Because these bacteria can live for years, including a dormant state in patients, they have adapted to their environment. So to select phages that will be most effective, we must recreate this environment.Alexandre Purset explains.

“Once the phages are selected, the CHUV Cell Production Center is responsible for purifying them and preparing them for therapy”Angela Koutsokera explains. “Clinical trials will then be used to validate the phage therapy, but also to study phenomena such as development, the immune response to the phages, and their effects on the patient’s microbiome.”

The financial obsession of pharma

This scientific, multidisciplinary approach applied to real patients appealed to the Leonard’s Foundation jury. It is fortunate that in Zurich, at the Life Science CEO Forum, not a word was said about phage therapy. No more than the microdosing of psychedelics or the protection of microbiota. We only talk about IP (Intellectual property, patents, in other words) IPOs and mergers and acquisitions. In the hubbub, a lobbyist working for pharmaceutical companies in a major Asian country immediately offered me money, as if it were common practice, on the condition that I write favorable articles on his clients…

As you see, the specific case of the phage therapy project awarded by the Leonards Foundation tells us many things: the growing openness of classical medicine to unconventional therapies, the need for scientific rigor to validate them, but also this passion financial company. Pharma J, with this brazen proposal from a representative of Asian companies, makes me question: Is it not corruption that is happening in the mainstream as well?