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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 14000

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

Koeris M.
Big Pharma & Big Government = Big Profits?
Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News 2008 Jul 8
http://www.genengnews.com/blog/item.aspx?id=411


Full text:

The recent announcement of GSK to allow input by the British government health care into which drug to develop bodes ill for the traditional pharmaceutical model of developing drugs that address a market need.

Granted a sceptic might say that never really was the business model of pharma and would be at least partially justified in saying so. However before we go into business models, let’s look at the shift in government industry interaction that seems to be happening.

GSK’s new chief executive, Andrew Witty, said the effort is part of his drive to help the world’s second-largest drug maker adapt to a tough pharmaceutical market. In recent years, soaring health-care costs have led insurers, governments and other drug buyers to tighten their belts.

Knowing the preferences of state health-care systems, which pay for the vast majority of all drugs sold in Europe, could make a big difference. A few weeks ago, Glaxo’s chief of research and development invited a group of health-care officials from the U.K., France, Italy and Spain to London to examine the drugs Glaxo is developing.

Apparently the officials gave some pretty blunt feedback on which drugs to prioritize and what sort of data Glaxo would need to show to make state health-care systems willing to buy the drugs, according to Mr. Witty.

But let’s look at the case of Tyverb (sold in the U.S. as Tykerb): it would cost about £20,000 per year (or nearly $40,000); total costs associated with administering the drug are about £80,000 (or nearly $160,000), as noted by Dow Jones Newswire. One study found women who received the drug survived for 8 weeks longer than the control group who received the currently approved drug.

The recommendation, written for the U.K.’s National Institutes for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) can be found here. I am not siding with anyone, I just want to get the facts out there and stimulate debate.

Far from being the only firm to turn to the governments for advice, Novartis AG of Switzerland also approached Britain’s state health system about an immunology drug and then altered its plans for the drug’s human testing so its studies could answer Britain’s concerns about efficacy and cost.

It seems big pharma is getting cozy with the big government programs that are in effect their biggest customers. It’s only a matter of time before we see more of that in the US.

 

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909