Tuesday, April 26, 2011

A Vaccine for Alzheimer's?

The basic argument of this blog is that it's better to pay to cure a disease than to merely pay--and pay, and pay, and pay--for care.

So now we are reading in the thepharmaletter:

A vaccine that has the potential to stop Alzheimer's disease progression could be available within a few years, according to reports in the UK’s Daily Mail and Daily Express newspapers. The product in question, known as CAD106, comes from the research laboratories of Zurich, Switzerland-based biotechnology firm Cytos Biotechnology (SWX: CYTN), which is also developing anti-smoking, obesity and flu vaccines.

There's no guarantee that any of these new potential vaccines will work, of course, and they may all prove to be an absolute fizzle.  Still with good leadership and the right economic and regulatory climate, we would be having a lot more of this productive scientific research.  And history tells us that good things come out of a heavy commitment to research.

Here in the US, that would mean a lot more hope about Medicare, for example, and a lot less fear.

And by the way, shouldn't this industry be in the US? Or is the economic plan for the 21st century to simply print dollars?  How long do we really think that will last?