Healthy Skepticism Library item: 12048

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Herper M.
Reeling In The Doctors
The Science Business (blog) 2007 Nov 8
http://blogs.forbes.com/sciencebizblog/2007/11/reeling-in-the-.html

Full text:

ORLANDO — Want to know what drugs and medical devices are being pushed at doctors? Walk the exhibit floor here at the annual scientific meeting of the American Heart Association.

The meeting, of course, is a forum for major research results. This is where new drugs have their coming-out parties. (This year, the debutante was the blood thinner prasugrel, from Eli Lilly and Sankyo Daiichi.)

But the exhibit floor is a window into what companies think they can market to cardiologists. It’s a giant expanse of company booths, gargantuan signs, computer animation, and pretty women on stress-test treadmills. And at every booth, there are free gifts: lots of pens, coffee, smoothies, laser pointers, and USB thumb drives.

So who’s selling what? Well, there’s a booth from Lilly with a neat computer-generated video explaining how platelets, tiny cells in the blood, cause blood clots, and how these blood clots lead to heart attacks.

That, incidentally, is the same mechanism by which that new drug, prasugrel, prevents heart attacks. Lilly and Sankyo can’t directly promote prasugrel to doctors until the Food and Drug Administration approves it, but they can educate doctors about the biology behind the medicine. (More on this strategy later.)

It’s good the companies are getting an early start, as many doctors are worried about prasugrel’s tendency to cause bleeding — and those worries persist despite the drug’s ability to cut heart attacks by 20%.

AstraZeneca had a big presence, having set up a theater to promote its blood pressure pill Atacand. To help promote its cholesterol drug Crestor, it has latched onto another strategy: a ride. A new campaign, called US Against Athero, includes a spaceship like module that people sit in. It rocks back and forth — creating a Fantastic Voyage-style look at the insides of plaque-filled arteries.

Crestor failed to show a statistically significant reduction in heart attack, stroke, and death in a big study of heart failure patients. But Astra is hoping it will get a claim from the FDA that the drug cleans out artery plaque.

Sanofi-Aventis had a booth set up about the ways in which a big gut and bad cholesterol levels increase the risk of heart attacks, including a neat three-dimensional film and a video touch-screen quiz. The obvious connection is Sanofi’s weight loss drug, rimonabant, which is marketed in Europe but is not approved in the U.S. because of concerns about its mood-altering side effects.

But studies underway could show that rimonabant decreases artery plaque or cardiovascular risk. John Kastelein of the University of the Netherlands says he prescribes the drug because it’s very useful for some patients, but he never gives it to any patient who might be depressed.

Merck had the coolest pens. Doctors could take a quiz on its blood pressure drug Hyzaar and get a free pen that is also a USB thumb drive. Then they could walk across the exhibit floor to another exhibit, that, like the Lilly and Sanofi booths, wasn’t branded with any particular drug name. But it asked docs to look at a series of ads about how low good cholesterol, bad high cholesterol, and high triglycerides (particles of fat in the blood) can all raise the risk of heart attacks in the blood.

The drug giant couldn’t say so, but it has a new pill that pairs niacin with an anti-flushing medicine called Cordaptive that is now before the FDA. If you answered Merck’s quiz, which seemed designed to see how well certain ads stuck with doctors, you got another USB port pen. But this one had a laser pointer, too.