AUSTIN, Texas — The multitrillion-dollar drug industry is trying to disrupt with the kids, and it’s running into a communications gap.
At SXSW, the weeklong TED Talk with a music festival in there somewhere, biotech this week has been trying to elbow its way into a conference that has ceded most of its time to tech, with its promises of a currency revolution, Martian colonization, and a hack for anything that moves.
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Illangkoon can scoff at the FDA all he wants but if he wants to sell something with hormones in it he will have to get FDA approval or go bankrupt or go to jail with a lawsuit from the justice department. You can find non-reasoned people anywhere, but I’d never be foolish enough to to buy a medication (especially somethign with hormones in it) and take it if it isn’t regulated. Even if it is topographical in nature. Nice way to mess up your health permentantely.
“If the product is intended for a therapeutic use, such as treating or preventing disease, or to affect the structure or function of the body, it’s a drug (FD&C Act, 201(g)), or in some cases a medical device (FD&C Act, 201(h)), even if it affects the appearance.”
It looks like at SXSW descended a bunch of miracle elixirs barkers, old west style, rather than respectable biotech scientists/entrepreneurs.
Even Ned David, he spent six years at Berkeley for his PhD publishing only one single modest research article. So, not exactly an outstanding scientific pedigree. But good enough, to get himself a PhD, apparently. And he made money with Kybella, a drug that is nothing more than deoxycholic acid, a substance you could buy from any chemical company, and inject yourself for any foreseeable future, for just a few bucks.
Surely, very good at making money (or pretending to). Not really, in advancing biotech science and medicine for real.