Stem Cell Treatment : BiotechConnection.com

Open Source Medicine?

I'm encouraged by recent developments in what's being called "personalized medicine." Cultivating adult stem cells and using them to replace or repair damaged tissues is an incredibly exciting idea. The cloning of T-cells to shore up the body's reserves and help turn the tide in fights against cancer, autoimmune diseases and AIDS, has the potential to turn deadly disease into chronic disease. And in many cases, incurable diseases seem on the verge of being completely treatable. All through the use of personalized medicine - treatments and cures tailored by a single doctor or treatment provider, for use by a single patient.

So, what's the bad news? These treatments are expensive, and nobody in the health care industry is willing to pay for a cure. Personalized medicine, generally entails the development of drugs, cells or tissues only compatible with the donor, who is most often the victim of the disease. In other words, these treatments are customized to the individual and therefor not marketable broadly.

The majority of medicinal treatments available today are subsidized by profit driven entities in the health care arena. Most often maligned - justly or not - are the pharmaceutical companies and the health care companies. Since a massive dose of my cultivated T-cells will do nothing to cure your disease, there's little in the way of money making potential. After all, I'm just one customer, and my cure is only good for me. How would say, pharmaceutical companies, benefit financially from such treatments.

More and more the future of human health is becoming about a process rather than a pill. Expenses related to treatments individual to the patient, cannot be amortized among those with similar illnesses. Worse yet for drug companies and health insurance corporations, a one-person one-cure scenario does nothing to lubricate the massive churning financial engine of highly lucrative drug and treatment markets. In the case of cloned T-cells, which in one case have been used to completely cure a man suffering from melanoma (skin cancer), there is no profit to be made by the drug companies at all, the hospitals gain nothing, doctors are not compensated by insurance companies who's interests are not in saving an individual life, but in maintaining the current market system.

The process of extracting, processing and culturing T-cells takes place between one doctor and one patient. Though the cost of treatment may be nearly as high as the total cost of medicating a person through death, the money would not be shuttled back and forth between huge corporate interests. If covered by private insurance, money would be drained directly from the reserves of company coffers, and into the waiting veins of the sick. Practically thrown away, resulting in nothing more than a saved life.

Obviously, this can't work fiscally, right? Some would point out that the high cost of medication and treatment is what pays for research and development. And this is currently the case. If drug companies and insurance companies lost the ability to make billions of dollars in profit, how would research be funded?

My response is so simple as to likely be completely impossible. This is where government should step in. Yes, government should involve itself in the medical welfare of the people. Isn't that the role of benevolent government? To further the good of the people. Taxes, WPA style programs and collaboration with researchers, who tend to be motivated more by "pure science" than cash payouts, would fill in the gaps left by profiteering pharmaceutical companies, doctors and pharmacists, dwindling bank accounts. I'm not talking about government deciding who should live or die, or even who should receive what treatment. I'm talking about the corporate body of citizens as represented by elected officials, choosing to divert money to pure, legally clear and patent-free, uninhibited, pure research, with a focus on curing disease.

I'm no dove, not quite a hawk, more like a turkey really, but when I think about the billions of dollars spent on warfare, weaponry, litigation, back-room deals and pandering to horribly inefficient and broken commercial colossi, I wonder, what could be accomplished if that funding were all diverted to simply finding ways to make us more healthy. Could the U.S. government commit to curing cancer, no matter it's effect on the economy of drug companies and insurance companies? Unlikely? Yeah. But for twenty years I've been told the same idea as applied to free software could never work. I mean, nobody can make a living just giving away a good thing. Right?