Healthy Skepticism Library item: 15816
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
Stewart J.
U of S adds research chair: Pharmaceutical companies contribute to new position
The StarPhoenix 2009 Jun 16
http://www2.canada.com/saskatoonstarphoenix/news/third_page/story.html?id=7221654e-b20b-4e68-b825-cb7fb008ccec
Full text:
Contributions from three major pharmaceutical companies and the provincial government will fund a new research chair position at the University of Saskatchewan to study why many patients don’t take their drugs as prescribed.
Pfizer Canada, AstraZeneca and Merck Frosst Canada have each contributed $400,000 to the “joint venture on patient adherence.”
Along with a $500,000 contribution from the provincial government, the drug companies will form a $1.7-million partnership with the U of S dedicated to studying the issue.
“It’s a complex problem that has been around for years,” said Dennis Gorecki, dean of the college of pharmacy and nutrition. He says “non-adherence” refers to those patients who do not take medication as directed by physicians, pointing out that in 2003, the World Health Organization described it as a problem of “striking magnitude” throughout the world.
Non-adherence costs between $7 billion and $9 billion per year in Canada, Gorecki said.
The new Chair in Patient Adherence to Drug Therapy, who Gorecki hopes to have in place by the fall, will work with pharmacy, medical and nursing professionals to improve adherence to drug programs. The chair will oversee research and educational activities, with the three pharmaceutical companies acting in an “advisory role.”
“It is well known across the country that so much of the research that is being done now and will be done in the future will be done pursuant to partnerships,” said university president Peter MacKinnon at a news conference.
Increasing costs of research and the size and scope of research makes partnerships among universities, government and industry “inevitable,” he said.
Prescription drugs represent the “fastest-growing portion of the health-care budget,” said Rob Norris, minister of advanced education, employment and labour.
The annual provincial budget for prescription drugs is more than $300 million per year.
“It’s about real people who . . . don’t take their medication,” said Mark Jones, president and CEO of AstraZeneca Canada. His company already has partnerships with several post-secondary institutions, including the University of Calgary and the University of Waterloo. This year alone, AstraZeneca will invest $100 million in research and development.
Jones said the U of S program will help the company “expand our collective understanding into the psychology around the use of these medicines.”
Negotiations with the three companies and the government took about four years.
