Case in point, Cuba's lung cancer vaccine[1]. Which a company has brought to the U.S. as CIMAvax-EGF[2].
[1]: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2018/01/09/cuba-ha...
That's interesting. I was just reading about how high dose IV vitamin c can induce cell death in a wide variety of cancers, but somehow, despite this being known for decades, nobody has done rigorous research on it.
https://www.cancer.gov/research/key-initiatives/ras/news-eve...
From what I can tell there are several things like this - that have promising anti cancer effects, that just don't really get that much attention because there's not a patent possible.
Really makes me think much less of medical science. Even if you couldn't patent any thing you'd think you could get fame and fortune by devising a useful therapy.
One must wonder if the therapy works if it's as trivial and simple as you say.
Rarely are these things straightforward and clear cut.
That being said, I recently broke my ankle, and found that the protocols still often include 6 weeks off it, despite modern evidence largely showing zero downsides (and some benefits, especially in terms of early recovery) to weight bearing immediately - Probably costing possibly billions of dollars in lost productivity and unnecessary PT every year.
I probably shouldn't get too high on my horse about random unexplored therapies - plenty of things in medicine that are just done some way because that's how it's always been done.
Medical trials to prove its safety in human subjects -- pretty essential -- is a lengthy, multi-stage process that is extremely expensive to carry out.
IIRC medical research is really expensive, hence money-seeking is to fund it within capitalism.
Also IIRC the rewards are oversized compared to the costs, but that doesn't change that the costs are also huge. Does mean I'm generally in favour of getting every government to quadruple public spending on this though. Whatever the current spend is, we can do more.
I don't see how something like high dose vitamin C IV is very expensive. I would assume a handful of oncologists could do the whole thing themselves. We get X patients a year, we randomly suggest the vitamin C IV to half, the half with vitamin C did better or worse by these metrics. Vitamin C is not expensive and they have to collect the outcome data for everyone involved anyway - so where is the expense coming from?
If it has benefits then more doctors will start to do it and more data will become available. If not, onto the next thing.
I'm not a physician and not in the medical field, but I would hazard a guess that a lot of the expense comes from just doing the work. What specific doctor will administer the vitamin C and monitor the patients? How do you isolate that the vitamin C dosage increase is effective? Who is going to create the vitamin C in the proper dosages? Who is going to write about it to make sure that it's legally approved? The human body is very sophisticated. The trials have to be done in a scientific way, following the established procedures of ethical medical treatment, peer reviewed, etc. And let's say you start giving vitamin C to some of these patients and they start having bad reactions and it makes their disease worse? Who covers the hospital stay? Who pays for their care?
Just looking at a few things there I'm guessing that's a few million dollars at the very least.. and even so you have to look at opportunity cost. Is this the best and most promising path of research for the physicians and researchers? Are there more promising compounds? Etc.
It happens already. You just have to find the docs who do it. Which usually means attending conferences which focus on specific diseases.