Comment by eep_social
5 hours ago
I can’t tell if you’re joking but a cure has been “ten years away” for so long that it is a meme inside the t1d community.
5 hours ago
I can’t tell if you’re joking but a cure has been “ten years away” for so long that it is a meme inside the t1d community.
I know the joke, and I am not joking.
Once a treatment reaches stage 3 trials, it often becomes generally available within 2 years.
Stage 3 is expensive for regular drugs but for treatments like these, the cost of one trial may exceed $100M. The fact it’s happening in several places around the world means there is very high confidence that the treatment is working and the race to market has started.
Most of the times, when people are saying the treatment is 10 years away, they are being very optimistic. Usually it’s after some research shows a new pathway to treatment, usually in mice or other mammals. This is far before human trials and even when human trials start, there is only about 2-7% probability of the treatment making to market. So some mammal responding to treatment in a lab means the chance this treatment will make it through trials for humans is probably in the range of 1%. Saying with certainty it will come in 10 years is a joke.
But contrast this with a treatment in stage 3 clinical trials, where for diabetes treatments specifically, the success rate is between 65% and 70%. And some real snake oil has gotten to stage 3, which this is not. I think it’s quite likely we will see a treatment soon. 10 years is a pessimistic estimate for this.
Stage 3 diabetes treatments are so easy to test, too. If they lower HbA1c, then they work. If they are safe enough that for at least one population of diabetes patients they will significantly extend their life, then the treatment is safe enough. And stem cell implants have the hallmarks of all this.
It’s important to look at the evidence and not be cynical. The treatment can fail onstage 3, but at the current time, it is far more likely to make it to market.