New Medication!?

Well, I started my new medication today. I started taking Enbrel. I have psoriasis and the lovely side effects that come with it (namely arthritis).
So, just wondering if anyone else of yous guys out here takes this stuff. I tried Humira last year. While my joints felt much better, it never affected the psoriasis. Sinkin stuff ain't cheap tho... The Humira was ~$1700.00 per shot, twice a month. My co-pay was $25.00. The Enbrel is even more ridiculous,
being $5305.00 for four shots and I have to take 2 shots a week. So I got a package with 8 shots for just under $11,000.00 :y::y::y: for 1 month...:eyepop:
Hopefully this stuff works. Time will tell. Oh, yea, same co-pay too. Luckily I have good insurance. Well, that's probably more than you guys needed to know about me, but thanks for listening (reading)....
If my posting starts to go wonky, ya know the side effects are kicking in...:wink::wink:

Adrian

+1 for full coverage insurance.

I give my wife a weekly shot of Avonex. She has Multiple Sclerosis.

For the $20 co-pay they Fedex a cooler to our house once a month with a supply of pre-filled syringes.

You can also get it at Walgreens for $5993.00 if you don't have insurance. (hint - don't get sick without insurance) :sad:

I stared having problems with psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis when I was 19. It has put me into a wheelchair sometimes.

Prednisone is the only thing that ever worked for me and that was in frighteningly high doses.

Those are very cutting edge medicines that have a very small area of usage. They often cost millions to develop and now you are pay for the development.

Unfortunately, these sort of meds might be a thing of the past.

The money is not in the development of antibiotics and arthritis meds. You make money with weight loss and impotence meds.

cwbullet said:

Those are very cutting edge medicines that have a very small area of usage. They often cost millions to develop and now you are pay for the development.

Unfortunately, these sort of meds might be a thing of the past.

The money is not in the development of antibiotics and arthritis meds. You make money with weight loss and impotence meds.

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Unfortunately for humanity there is a lot of truth in the limited develment of antibiotics, but a great many of us are still working on currently untreatable diseases. I wish all I had to do was solve ED; that was an easy problem compared to what I work on. Viagra was solved by accident, because patients in a discontinued cardiovascular trial wouldn't give the experimental drug back. One study coordinater got so frustrated that she met with the patient's doctors to find out why. The big barrier to treating ED was no one at Pfizer thought there was a market for it until the patients refused to surrender their drugs.

Now back to the OP. Enbril and Humira are both biologics, meaning far more complicated that a simple drug. Humira blocks the signal from a particularly powerful cytokine (read as immune/inflammation pisser-offer) TNFalpha, and Enbril is a soluble receptor (meaning it grabs the cytokine before it can relate the signal to the cell to go nuts) for the same cytokine. The cost to produce these is orders of magnitude more than a normal small molecule drug, which partially leads to the price, but is really only one factor. I would like to go into more, but I am part of a research project that is partnered with one of those two companies, so it wouldn't really be appropriate. Good luck with the new treatment, I hope it helps.

Sure hope it helps ya' buddy! That's about as scientific as it's going to get from me.

Enbrel is pretty expensive but fortunately we have full coverage and make only the co-pays. 0bamacare scares the hell out of me.

As a physician, the ACA scares me too. I am loosing some patients, but they were not paying patients. That is not what scares me. I am worried that it will further stifle development of new treatments with it medical device taxes.

I hope the medicine helps you too.

That is a very good description do the mechanism of the drug. I may have to borrow it. I often struggle with this class of drugs.

If there's any good news about psoriasis it's that it's part of a class of clinical indications collectively referred to as immune-mediated inflammatory diseases, or IMIDs, that have overlapping mechanisms of action. This includes rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, COPD, Lupus, inflammatory bowel disease, asthma, and others. Overlapping mechanisms of action mean a drug that helps one of these indications may very well help others in the IMID class. At any one time, about 7-10 % of the world's population suffers from one of the IMIDs. So, there's a big market and there is a lot of development in this space, meaning hope for patients.

Good luck with the new therapy. The company I work for had a hand in helping bring it to market, and I hope it gives you some relief.

Marc

Marc_G said:

If there's any good news about psoriasis it's that it's part of a class of clinical indications collectively referred to as immune-mediated inflammatory diseases, or IMIDs, that have overlapping mechanisms of action. This includes rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, COPD, Lupus, inflammatory bowel disease, asthma, and others. Overlapping mechanisms of action mean a drug that helps one of these indications may very well help others in the IMID class. At any one time, about 7-10 % of the world's population suffers from one of the IMIDs. So, there's a big market and there is a lot of development in this space, meaning hope for patients.

Good luck with the new therapy. The company I work for had a hand in helping bring it to market, and I hope it gives you some relief.

Marc

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chadrog said:

Sure hope it helps ya' buddy! That's about as scientific as it's going to get from me.

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Thanks. I'll give it a couple of months and see how it all goes.

Adrian

cwbullet said:

As a physician, the ACA scares me too. I am loosing some patients, but they were not paying patients. That is not what scares me. I am worried that it will further stifle development of new treatments with it medical device taxes.

I hope the medicine helps you too.

That is a very good description do the mechanism of the drug. I may have to borrow it. I often struggle with this class of drugs.

Click to expand...

The good thing about the ACA is that, in the past, if you needed an $11,000-per-month medicine, and you didn't have insurance, there's no way you could get insurance, and probably no way to get your medicine either. Now you can get it.

jd2cylman said:

Thanks. I'll give it a couple of months and see how it all goes.

Adrian

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I hope it goes well.

Well, got my first side effects of the drug this weekend. My feet and ankles started to swell Sunday. So called the doc at 8am today. Nurse said she'd call back. 1:00 pm comes and no call... Must not be life threatening Told me not to take the drug, thanks captain obvious And told me to go see a doctor. So after work went to the Convenient Care place down the road from the GF's house. They took two vials of blood to test and all turned out OK. So, he put me Prednisone and a antibiotic (don't remember name).
Since I work on my feet all day, the doc says I have to stay home at least for tomorrow and keep my feet up to try to get the swelling down. Well at least I got a rocket flown Saturday at the club launch... All the work I need to do rocket wise involves standing up. So movies it is.

Adrian

...so my $11 a day Januvia isn't so bad It's one of the newer class of diabetic drugs that supposedly helps kick the pancreas to produce insulin. Read up on the internet it can increase the incidence of pancreatac cancer....damn...

Only way around it is to go on insulin injections, not happening. As I told my doctor if I have to do that I'm a dead man, no kidding. No needles for me, I'm phobic. To the point of getting up from the chair where I had the rubber band around my arm for a simple blood test draw. That or pass out. I finally got it done after my wife slipped me one of her Adavan(think that's right) that really blunted the sword of anxiety.

I could not imagine needing $11,000 in drugs to keep me alive, that's just obsene. These things is where I feel our goverment should be spending our money, not sending armored assault support vehicles to our police departments.

dave carver said:

...so my $11 a day Januvia isn't so bad It's one of the newer class of diabetic drugs that supposedly helps kick the pancreas to produce insulin. Read up on the internet it can increase the incidence of pancreatac cancer....damn...

Only way around it is to go on insulin injections, not happening. As I told my doctor if I have to do that I'm a dead man, no kidding. No needles for me, I'm phobic. To the point of getting up from the chair where I had the rubber band around my arm for a simple blood test draw. That or pass out. I finally got it done after my wife slipped me one of her Adavan(think that's right) that really blunted the sword of anxiety.

I could not imagine needing $11,000 in drugs to keep me alive, that's just obsene. These things is where I feel our goverment should be spending our money, not sending armored assault support vehicles to our police departments.

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I don't have any problem giving myself the shot. After all, I've given hundreds to animals over the years. I do have a little problem when it comes to blood tests. I'm 50/50 on whether or not I'll pass out. Luckily, I don't need this to keep me alive, so no big deal that it doesn't work (at least at the current dose). I was just hoping to avoid messy ointments that take some time to apply. Oh well, lets see what's next.

Adrian