DailyDirt: Fighting The Next Pandemic

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The last flu season was pretty rough, but there's a new H7N9 strain that has no vaccine (yet!) and is starting to infect and kill people (instead of sticking to birds). We're just about coming to the tenth anniversary of SARS, and we're still creating over 100 million flu vaccines every year using egg embryos -- a process that takes months, time that we might not have if a really serious flu strain spreads quickly across the globe. Here are a few projects that are making vaccines more quickly.

• Tobacco plants can be made transgenic in order to grow vaccines for us, and they've been shown to be able to produce over a million doses of vaccine in a few weeks. DARPA has a challenge out to anyone who can produce vaccines at a rate of 10 million doses in a month. [url]
• Genetically modified tobacco plants can be grown and harvested by robots -- producing vaccine proteins very quickly and efficiently -- without the need for human labor. These robots can grow tens of thousands of tobacco plants in a batch, and it's likely only a matter of time before researchers can get these plant factories to produce other kinds of pharmaceuticals. [url]
• Flublok relies on insects to grow flu vaccines for us -- a process that has been used for other kinds of vaccines, but has only started to be used for the flu. Flublok has already been FDA approved, so it will be available to patients for the 2013-2014 flu season. [url]
• Bananas could potentially be grown with edible vaccines, but the regulatory hurdles for development have caused researchers to focus on non-edible vaccines grown in other plants (like tobacco). Bananas grown for edible vaccines might still be viable for treating fish or other animals. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: bananas, flu, flu season, flublok, gmo, h7n9, robots, sars, tobacco, vaccine
Companies: darpa

DailyDirt: Thank You For Not Smoking

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

People have been smoking tobacco for centuries (if not longer), but the health problems associated with tobacco have only been shifting from correlation to causation over the last decade or so. As usual, technology might be able to help... by improving how tobacco is used -- with various kinds of smokeless delivery mechanisms or with better treatments for addiction/cancer/etc. So the trend of a shrinking population of smokers might slow down or reverse course if there's a breakthrough in tobacco tech someday. But don't hold your breath.

• Smokers in the US could be extinct by 2046 -- not from dying, but because fewer and fewer people are smoking and a simple extrapolation points to about 34 years from now. A Citibank report has a few other linear predictions for the end of smoking: the UK in 2040, France in 2118, Germany in 2280... [url]
• In 2000, Philip Morris commissioned an infamous study in the Czech Republic on the impact of smoking -- which found that the cost "benefits" of smokers' early mortality along with cigarette-tax revenue outweighed the economic drawbacks of the healthcare costs for smokers. Live fast, die young... and help the national debt/deficit. [url]
• The FDA is looking at dissolvable, smokeless tobacco products that look a lot like candy. Chocolate, peanut butter and nicotine -- three great tastes that taste great together. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: fda, healthcare, nicotine, predictions, smoking, tobacco
Companies: citibank, philip morris

Tobacco Companies Think Their Trademarks Are More Important Than Your Health

from the who-needs-lungs-anyway? dept

Back in January of this year, Techdirt reported on tobacco companies suing a local Australian importer of their products for covering up part of their logos with a mandatory health warning. At the time, a spokeswoman for the company involved, British American Tobacco, said:

As the matter is currently before the Court, BAT is unable to comment other than to say that this is a further demonstration that we will take all necessary steps to protect our valuable intellectual property.

Given that stance, it will come as no surprise to learn that tobacco companies are now threatening to take on the European Commission as well:

EU Health Commissioner John Dalli will face legal action if he tries to reproduce Australia's plain-packaging proposals for cigarettes in Europe, a tobacco industry representative warned this week.

The approach is the same as in Australia:

One likely focus of attack is intellectual property rights, since plain packaging has a smothering effect on companies' logos and trademarks.

I'd like to think that the word "smothering" was taken verbatim from some tobacco company representative, because it sums up nicely the industry's attitude: that any breathing difficulties or respiratory diseases that you may develop as the result of smoking pale into insignificance compared with the outrageous "smothering" of their logos and trademarks.

That's a particularly callous attitude, because those logos and trademarks are only valuable to the degree they have been attached to products that have caused death and disease: the "best" brands are those with a track record of selling – and hence killing – more people than rival products. In effect, the tobacco companies are complaining that all their hard work getting people addicted and smoking themselves to death will be wasted if the plain-packaging proposals for cigarettes are implemented.

The cynical posturing of tobacco firms as the victims in these continuing attempts to undo and avoid the social harm they cause underlines once more how easily intellectual monopolies can be twisted for purposes far from any original justification they may once have had. Patents can kill: so, it seems will trademarks, if tobacco companies get their way.

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Filed Under: health, smoking, tobacco, trademarks