THE WOES OF BIG PHARMA

Linda and Carolyn, 1991

Nice shot.  Where at?

 

I have used up my quota of free articles from the NY Times web page, but maybe Dick Ingwall will keep me in the loop.  Inshallah!

My last article was an interesting essay on the woes of the pharmaceutical industry.  If you haven’t used your ten free peeks, you may be able to read it at:

http://nyti.ms/1nkg1x5

Again, Inshallah!  (I am reading a spy novel that uses lots of Arabic ejaculations.) 

So, apparently the pace of innovation in the pharm industry has slackened rather dramatically.  The reasons seems to be economic as well as regulatory.  It costs so much to develop mass-market drugs that Big Pharma often despairs of recovering their investment, let alone of making a profit, before their patent runs out and generics take over 80% of the market.  Also, some new drugs cost so much that medical insurance plans won’t cover them.  (Try $84,000 per dose for a new “blockbuster” drug for hepatitis C.) 

Oddly enough, the exception to this dearth of innovation seems to revolve around the so-called “orphan drugs”, which are drugs developed to confront diseases (including several kinds of cancer) that are exceedingly rare.  Apparently the FDA permits smaller and cheaper clinical trials for these drugs, because there are too few sufferers to people a full-size Stage 3 clinical trial.  Also, the insurance companies are less reluctant to pay for such drugs – often costing $100,000 or more per treatment – because there are so few potential claimants.    

As one wag put it, “more people are studying orphan diseases than actually HAVE orphan diseases.”

FYI:  Linda’s Team trails Fred Hutch by $5.00 as of this morning.  Remember – I will (grudgingly) match anything you contribute .    http://community.swedish.org/summerun/2014/2014-summerun----team-page?tab=0&frtid=1657