Diabetes is the seventh highest cause of death in the U.S.Cuba has a diabetes miracle treatment that could save tens of thousands of lives but the US is bloc...
  • Rania Rudhan 🇩🇿🏳️‍⚧️
    31•1 year ago

    Everyone: stop blockade on Cuba

    USA: no 🍔

    Cuba: we have treatment of diabetes that could save millions of lives

    USA: adds another reason to the blockade

    • @BenEarlDaMarxist
      4•1 year ago

      adds another reason to the blockade

      And not a good reason. So, common US anti-communist action.

  • @whoami
    20•1 year ago

    if you have a cheaper/more effective treatment of diabetes how can we profit off of people’s misery?

  • Preston Maness ☭
    7•1 year ago

    As a type two diabetic myself, with a type one diabetic father, I actually did some thorough digging on this last night. I left a comment on the YouTube channel – in response to the one that indicated clinical trials were underway in the United States – that either didn’t go through at all, was removed by BreakThrough news, or was banned and/or marked-as-spam by YouTube. Take your pick of options. The tl;dr is that, if there were ever any trials in the U.S., their results weren’t documented. And I speculate that efforts to study the treatment inside the US, with intention of seeking FDA approval, never got to the point of actually getting trials going.

    The treatment in question, Heberprot-P, is for diabetic foot ulcers (DFU). DFUs are difficult to treat if not caught early and are a source of tens of thousands of amputations every year in the United States. Their mortality grows over time as well if left untreated. Heberprot-P was first created in 2007, but the first mentions of clinical trials found in the U.S.'s clinical trials database can be found here in 2016:

    https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?cond=&term=heberprot-p&cntry=&state=&city=&dist=

    Specifically, the two studies are:

    The responsible parties in each case are not U.S. companies. Dasman Diabetes Institute is from Kuwait. Bio-Manguinhos is from Brazil (so far as I can tell). And their latest updates are from 2017, with only one study being listed as completed (the less rigorous observational one that occurred in Kuwait), and neither including any results, which tells me that there probably have not been any completed clinical studies in the United States on Haberprot-P, be they sponsored by foreign national-owned entities or U.S. national-owned entities.

    That being said, the YouTube comment in question mentioned that trials were underway for a U.S. company called Mercurio Biotec:

    Joelle Deloison 18 hours ago Admittedly this is taking a long time, but there have been trials on Heberprot-P in the US. The US firm Mercurio Biotec signed an agreement with the Cuban government years ago.

    So I dug into Mercurio Biotec. There is mention of it on the official Cuban government news site Granma with the article dated 2018-03-21:

    Meanwhile, “The United States Department of the Treasury, Office of Foreign Assets Controls, authorized Mercutio Biotec to enter into agreements with the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (CIGB), to conduct all transactions necessary to import Heberprot-P to conduct independent clinical trials authorized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA),” according to the Mercurio Biotec website.

    The given website, mercuriobiotec.com, no longer resolves. The domain isn’t registered. But according to the WayBack Machine, it did exist at some point. A snapshot from January 2018 does corroborate the claim that the Granma article mentions at least, that the company is in the process of getting FDA approval for the treatment. But the website is really just a splash page with little detail and a contact form that didn’t have any static contact information.

    There is another reference dated two days after the Granma article, on 2018-03-23, from a legal firm under the name Kegler Brown, mentioning one Luis M. Alcalde, an attorney for Kegler Brown, who was heavily involved:

    March 23, 2018

    Mercurio Biotec, LLC, an emerging American Biotech company closely allied with the Arizona Center for Accelerated Biomedical Innovation at the University of Arizona, has signed agreements with the Cuban company Heber Biotec S.A. The agreements encompass aspects necessary for (eventual) commercialization of the diabetic foot ulcer medication Heberprot-P in the United States, subject to approval by the Federal Drug Administration.

    Kegler Brown attorneys Luis M. Alcalde and Steve Barsotti served as counsel to Mercurio throughout the negotiation process. Along with numerous meetings in Washington, D.C., with U.S. regulators and officials, Alcalde and Barsotti made a combined nine visits to Havana to help lead negotiations and conclude various agreements between Mercurio and Heber Biotec.

    Kegler Brown is only the second U.S. law firm to have successfully completed signed agreements with Cuba to bring Cuban-origin pharmaceuticals to the U.S.

    Kegler Brown has had a practice focused on Cuba for a number of years led by Cuban-American attorney Luis M. Alcalde. Steve Barsotti leads the firm’s practice focus on start-up and growth enterprise, and co-chair’s the firms IP and technology practice groups. Both Alcalde and Barsotti have substantial experience negotiating cross-border transactions as part of the firm’s Global Business practice group.

    Heberprot-P must be approved by the Food and Drug Administration before being commercially available in the U.S.

    And there’s a local news article from Cronkite News Arizona PBS, though this one is dated nearly two years earlier, 2016-03-30:

    Armstrong and others have high hopes for a drug from Cuba, Heberprot-P, which can speed healing of diabetic lesions, according to researchers working on the drug.

    Developed 10 years ago, the drug has been used to treat more than 200,000 patients for foot ulcers in 26 different countries.

    Carlton Anderson is CEO and co-founder of Mercurio Biotec, which was formed for the purpose of bringing Heberprot-P to the United States. He thinks the drug, which has been shown to have success rates as high as 70 to 80 percent, could make a huge difference for diabetic patients.

    Heberprot-P is now in the process of being approved for clinical trials in the U.S., trials that Armstrong hopes the University of Arizona will be a part of before the end of this year.

    “We’re talking about marrying just a little bit of technology with some tenacity to make a difference and prevent amputations in our patients,” Armstrong said. “And the great news is that we can do it.”

    The article also embeds a YouTube video also with the same date for upload (2016-03-30).

    So… given all this, we have some mentions of Mercurio Biotec from 2016, with names Carlton Anderson and Luis Manuel Alcalde.

    There’s a couple of potential matches for corporate entities that are similar to Mercurio Biotec:

    The 2019 dissolution date of one of those entities roughly lines up with the timeline of the domain’s snapshots in the Wayback machine going dark (the last few snapshots are of a domain parking page). And the incorporation dates are in 2016, roughly lining up with the earliest news articles. And Luis Manuel Alcalde, the attorney mentioned as being heavily involved in negotiation between Washington and Cuba, is listed as an officer on one. But there’s no mention of “co-founder” Carlton Anderson as an agent of these companies.

    So… the last place I could think to go digging was trying to find out what Luis Manuel Alcalde and Carlton Anderson are up to now, and try to reach out to them directly.

    From what I can tell this is Luis’ LinkedIn, which does indicate he is in Ohio and has extensive cross-border legal experience, and this is his Twitter, with no activity in over a year. Regardless, I asked him on Twitter to chime in. Guess we’ll see what comes of that. Because the trail goes cold with the dissolution of Mercurio Biotec in 2019.

    As for Carlton Anderson, I believe he is or was a member of this venture capital firm, Ventac Partners. And his Linkedin.

    • MexicanCCPBotOP
      3•1 year ago

      Really interesting. I wonder if the re-blockade at the end of Trump’s term had something to do with it, though that happened in 2020 iirc. From the looks of it, it was really close to being commercialized in the US.

      • Preston Maness ☭
        3•1 year ago

        My gut tells me that, since the effort was largely (if not entirely) being spearheaded by, presumably, sympathetic Cuban-Americans, that they ran into roadblocks at every step of the journey. But ultimately, I can’t speak for them, hence my desire to get them to speak on the matter themselves.

  • @big_spoon
    6•1 year ago

    “i’m dying of diabetes here!”

    “USA: well…go to cuba if you trust in their savage communist medicine!”

    “but i can’t travel to cuba from USA!”

    • @sinovictorchan
      5•1 year ago

      The assumption that everyone have the wealth to afford the travel cost and residential cost and the assumption that everyone have the connection to government senior officers to apply for citizenship in any countries are something that only the rich free riding Liberals and the ‘victims’ of Communism could take for granted. The majority of people like refugees do not have the enornous wealth and government connection to freely immigrate to any countries that they wish. In fact, the NATO state governments are intentionally supporting terrorists and repressive governments to create more refugees than the second European civil war that ended in 1950 so that they can exploit the refugees for cheap labor, slavery, prostitution, organ harvesting, and unethical human experimentation.

      The assumption that the present condition of a country is based solely on the current government is also not logical. There are mismanagement by former corrupted regimes, sanctions by European empires, forced isolation, foreign intervention, misinformation, geographical factors, and natural resource. Most of the Global South governments cannot be like the USA government or other free riding imperialist governments in Europe who gain their success by their decision to continue their free riding over the colored people and former European colonies. If the Liberal belief that the policies and ideology of the current government dictate the economic and living condition of their country, then the Communist governments would be superior over the USA since the USSR beat the USA in the space race despite the initial underdevelopment of Eastern Europe and the need of USSR to recover from multiple unavoidable wars that the USA would not need to suffer from. The USA would also not blame the evil overpowered hard working innovation fictional Communist mastermind for all the problems in their own country if the USA government can dictate the material conditions of their country and the USA would not enforce protectionist policies through the Bretton Wood institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank against former European colonies and Communist countries in their Liberal contradiction to free trade.

    • @CriticalResist8A
      3•1 year ago

      You’re technically not allowed to go to Cuba for medical treatment if you’re a US citizen.