I find this and similar posts so sad.
As someone working in R&D for one of the "Dreaded Evil Pharmaceutical Companies Who Are Only After Profit and Don't Give a Damn About Curing Diseases or Improving Patients' Lives" I find this attitude on the part of people who in general have very little idea of what is involved very disheartening.
I am a chemist who designs drugs. As such, I spent 4 years in university as an undergraduate, followed by an additional 5 years in graduate school to get my Ph.D. in organic chemistry. Then I worked for $25/year doing postdoctoral work in a lab before getting my first "real" job as a scale-up chemist for a small company for 3 years.
Wanting to get into drug R&D, I joined another small company for 3 more years, which had some promising compounds and was bought out by a larger pharmaceutical company. They took the pipeline and promptly closed the company, and I fortunately found my current job, doing research on interesting targets for treatment of diabetes. It only took me 16 years to get here.
Anyone who claims that complex diseases like cancer have "cures" that are being ignored have absolutely no idea of the complexity of the diseases involved, or in the resources required to bring any compound to the marketplace.
Mouse models for cancer mean very little. As a whole, biologists have cured millions of mice of cancer, and very few people. It just doesn't normally translate very well... partly because the cancer in a mouse is normally the result of xenographic transplant of a specific human cancer cell line into the mouse. In reality, very few cancers in people are anywhere near that specific, and most compounds that are "general" enough to affect multiple cancer cell lines carry a fairly high toxic load as well (see Taxol for instance).
When biologists are sent into strange locals to find new drugs, they do then look for the active ingredients to make into a drug. This is NOT because natural products aren't profitable... have a look at the nutraceuticals industry to dispell that myth. The actual reasons for this are several: the natural material is very likely to have side effects caused by other materials present beside the pharmaceutically active ingredient; the material may be produced in very small amounts (they killed thousands and thousands of yew trees for the first couple of grams of taxol before synthetic routes were designed to get the same compound with less impact; when you go to compounds coming from specific insects, frogs, marine sponges, etc. the amount available tends to drop even further and makes it impossible to get something into the clinic for trials, nevermind being marketted as a drug); often the natural product has poor absorption or clearance rates and needs to be chemically manipulated to make something more attractive for dosing, or to get better selectivity on the target(s) of interest.
Now on to the greed section. Yes, pharmaceutical companies make money; those that don't are soon swallowed, bought out by others, or dry up and disappear. This is a fact of life of living in a free market economy, and no one is surprised when this is applied to other industries (see auto industry for example). The cost of bringing a promising pharmaceutical compound to market is astronomical... approximately 900 million dollars according to studies from the late 1990's (
http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/38/15/25)
The time available for a company to make a profit on the compound is short; the clock starts ticking when the patents are filed, which is usually many years before anything can be brought to market. If you have a 20 year exclusivity window by modern patent laws, it may take 12 years to get something to market, leaving only 8 years before other companies can start making and selling generic versions of your drug. You have done the investment of research, time, and huge amounts of money for the clinical trials to prove that it is safe and effective; the generics companies reap the rewards as soon as it is "off-patent", and focus their research solely on less expensive manufacturing methods.
In general, the only money that feeds the R&D pipeline of a company comes from these blockbuster drugs during the short period while they are covered by the patent laws.
In all of the years of pharmaceuticals, we have "cured" only a handful of diseases that I'm aware of (eg. Polio, syphillis, we thought we had tuberculosis, but it's coming back in drug resistant forms now). Why? The simple reason is that most disease are multifactorial and have multiple forms. Cancers, bacteria and viruses all mutate; what is curing these diseases now won't do so indefinitely. There are a lot of different strategies tackling these problems (eg. hitting multiple unrelated targets, etc) but the efficacy of these methods is not fully known at the moment. Diabetes and metabolic diseases are even more complex; there's a massive system of biofeedback and multiple biological pathways involved that we're only starting to get a handle on.
For some reason, pharmaceutical companies in this country are more vilified than gun manufacturers, in spite of the fact that they (we) have done massive things to improve the length and quality of life and have been able to intervene and help with many devastating diseases affecting people. Don't believe me? Compare the survival rates for a breast cancer diagnosis 30 years ago to today.
It's very sad.
