FaunaClassifieds - View Single Post - Universal antivenom being tested at Duke could change snake bite treatment worldwide

07-12-2022, 10:44 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bcr229

This treatment won't be cheap. A 2018 study of Varespladib to treat coral snake venom in pigs - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6265968/ - found an effective dosage of 1 mg per kg of patient body weight, so about 50 mg of Varespladib would be needed to treat an adult person.

Current pricing can be found from chemical supply stores. These are not drug makers, these stores sell to the makers, and of course there's going to be a ton of markup by the maker and then the retailer. Unless someone has an awesomely generous pharmacy/insurance plan or guaranteed low co-pays, I don't see a keeper being able to afford keeping a dose at home.

https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/US/en/p.../sigma/sml1100

https://www.adooq.com/varespladib-methyl.html

Those are small-scale research samples at lower purity. They do not represent the cost of higher-purity API in a Drug Product manufactured at scale. It is completely disconnected. If you want to see another disconnected example (that might put one's mind at ease to a degree), look at a reference standard on Sigma for metformin hydrochloride (an inexpensive API in tablets commonly and inexpensively used as a first-line treatment for oral control of insulin resistance and Type-II diabetes mellitus) Mind you, I am not saying the drug will be inexpensive, but the pricing of research samples is not indicative of the cost of Drug Product due to undisclosed contributing factors in the background.