drug industry

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September 21, 2011 | 12:00 PM | By

Why we still don’t have a cure for AIDS — a novel explanation

Open Door Press

If someone discovered a cure for AIDS, would the pharmaceutical industry be able to – or even want to — develop it?

That’s one of the questions explored in Through These Veins, the first novel by Anne Marie Ruff, a veteran journalist who has covered AIDS, medical research, biodiversity and other international issues for many publications.

It’s perhaps also a question worth asking in reality this week as international leaders have been meeting at the United Nations and throughout New York City to debate, among other things, how best to fight disease in poor countries.

HIV infection is today, in rich countries at least, no longer a death sentence but rather a manageable, chronic disease almost like diabetes thanks to the development of effective anti-HIV drugs.

That’s obviously of life-saving benefit to millions of people infected with HIV who can get these drugs.

It’s also one of the great success stories for what some might call the “medical-industrial-complex.” At the risk of sounding a bit crass, people with HIV, like people with other chronic diseases, have to keep buying these products in order to stay alive.

Is there just as much market incentive for a drug company to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to find a cure for AIDS? Ruff doesn’t think so.

“I would challenge you to show me a pharmaceutical company that can afford to undertake the very expensive, risky, and long-term research necessary to develop a cure for HIV/AIDS, or almost any other disease for that matter,” she told me. “The sales model simply will not support the effort.”

(Maybe not for drug companies. But I should note that there are medical scientists at the Fred Hutchinson Research Center exploring a gene-modification approach to curing HIV infection.)

Ruff says she isn’t necessarily criticizing the drug industry (though one fictional company, Klaus Pharmaceuticals, is certainly the bad guy in her novel). Drug makers are simply responding to market forces, she says, and are legally required to their shareholders to pursue the most lucrative business strategy.

Unfortunately, she says, the money is in treating and not curing. And the scientific community, Ruff adds, tends to follow the money also. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Health, Anne Marie Ruff, drug industry, HIV-AIDS, UN Week
June 30, 2011 | 12:27 PM | By

Al Jazeera: The great billion-dollar drug (and vaccine) scam?

Flickr, anolob

The pharmaceutical industry often trots out some pretty stunning numbers to explain why their drugs cost so much. A journalist and South African scholar scrutinizes the numbers for Al Jazeera.

In the first part of a two-part series called “The great billion dollar drug scam,” investigative journalist Khadija Sharife begins her analysis (interestingly, oddly, labeled by Al Jazeera as an opinion piece) with a focus on the Gates Foundation-backed global vaccination project known as GAVI, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization:

Alongside pneumococcal diseases such as meningitis and pneumonia, rotavirus-related diarrhoea is a primary childhood killer in developing countries, thought to snuff out the lives of 500,000 children each and every year. An overwhelming 85 per cent of these children are African and Asian. The need for medical miracles is as great as ever, but corporate mispricing generates huge profits, while driving up the price of life saving medicines.

British-based drug corporation GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) recently offered a five-year deal to supply poor nations with 125 million doses of the rotavirus vaccine – Rotarix – at $2.50 a dose, just five per cent of the current going price in Western markets. Through the GAVI group, the international vaccine agency financed by developed nations such as the UK, it is hoped that GSK and pharmaceutical multinational Merck – who, between them, dominate the rotavirus vaccine market – will provide a secure line of low-cost drugs for as many as forty countries in the near future.

But is it really a discount, and if so, who is paying the cost?

I think this is easy enough to answer: Yes, these are clearly discounts (about one-tenth what the vaccine costs in the U.S.) and we in the rich world are basically subsidizing cheaper vaccines for the poor world.

Is it enough of a discount? Some think not. Others think we’re getting a pretty good deal and need to be more sympathetic to the much-maligned drug industry. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Justice, Science, drug industry, GAVI, pricing, R&D, vaccines
June 24, 2011 | 8:00 AM | By

Owen Barder: Should we pay less for vaccines?

Owen Barder

Owen Barder, a development expert at the Center for Global Development, asks “Should we pay less for vaccines?”

Barder’s post was prompted by the critical response some advocacy groups, like Oxfam and Médecins Sans Frontières (aka Doctors Without Borders) made after the successful fund-raising effort on June 13 by the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, a massive project getting vaccines out to poor kids.

As I noted at the time, these organizations and others were glad to see GAVI receive $4.3 billion in new funding but they felt the alliance was a bit too friendly to the drug industry and too willing to accept industry pricing.

This issue, of what constitutes fair vaccine pricing for poor countries, came up repeatedly this week at Seattle’s Pacific Health Summit. I intend to write about that in a separate post later.

For now, I urge you to read Barder’s excellent take on the critics of GAVI and the vaccine manufacturers. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Basics, Doctors Without Borders, drug industry, GAVI, Owen Barder, Oxfam, vaccines