Coming Trend — Pharmaceutical Companies as Research Parasites

02 March 2011

Big Pharma is our best friend forever, right?

Remember how pharmaceutical companies defended shockingly high United States drug prices by saying that they need absurdly high profit margins to pay for researching new drugs?

Consider this from one of the world’s two most prestigious general science journals (Science):

Pfizer's R&D budget, $9.3 billion in 2010, will drop to less than $8.5 billion this year and to between $6.5 billion and $7 billion in 2012, and the company will stop funding research in internal medicine, allergy and respiratory diseases, urology, and tissue repair.

Executives saw these areas as “risky” and less likely to produce profitable drugs. In contrast, research funding in neuroscience, oncology, vaccines, and other areas will stay steady or increase.

In essence, Pfizer and its peers have begun to outsource R&D. They're doing so partly because basic research is expensive and prone to failure, says Kenneth Kaitin, director of the Tufts University Center for the Study of Drug Development in Boston.

In many cases, it's simply more economical for big pharma to let hungry start-ups and other institutes survey the biological landscape and find promising leads.

Nature’s Colin Macilwain said that Pfizer’s announcement should awaken government policy-makers to the fact that the current pharmaceutical-delivery model is not working.

The pharmaceutical industry is taking them for a ride.

Drug executives know that, however they behave, public money will continue to flow into the industry from spending on basic research and the purchase of final products.

For almost a decade now, drug-makers such as Pfizer have claimed that they can maintain huge research and development expenditures despite the increasing rarity of new 'blockbuster' drugs.

This serves two purposes: it has persuaded investors that there is, really, something lucrative in the pipeline; and it has beguiled politicians into throwing public money at the early stages of drug development.

The closure of the labs in Sandwich is a sure sign that this process isn't delivering, in Britain or elsewhere. That is despite massive government investment — notably from the US National Institutes of Health, whose US$32-billion budget is chiefly devoted to finding ideas for the industry.

Big Pharma plans to dump risk onto taxpayers and biomedical entrepreneurs

In my mind, this means that Pfizer (and its pillow cronies) don’t need inflated profits anymore.

If Big Pharma is not going to do basic research in difficult areas, why should the public tolerate (a) having to do its research for it and (b) pay inflated drug prices at the same time?

Gullible us

Pfizer’s announcement apparently anticipates that Western civilization is naive enough to throw itself under the industry’s research-distorting, money-extorting ways.

Colin Macilwain concluded that the only way to obtain a better return on health research and medical expenditures is to change the way the industry operates. He suggested that intellectual property law and regulation have too firm a grip on the biological sciences:

This tightening is what the industry wanted — it has bolstered profits and reduced drug piracy — but there is little evidence that it has increased the flow of innovative therapies.

Big Pharma’s sneaky ways

I go further than Macilwain. I know from experience as an antitrust attorney that Big Pharma abuses a combination of patent law and Food and Drug Administration regulations to repress drug development by competing, smaller manufacturers. These abuses restrict the flow of helpful, cheaper drugs into the marketplace.

Unfortunately,

(i) the Patent Office has cooperated in this trend by issuing patents that are, according to the original intent of patent law, legally and biologically indefensible;

(ii) most judges and lawyers are too scientifically ignorant to see through the misstatements that the industry likes to foist on the courts;

and

(iii) wherever necessary, Big Pharma buys favorable law, agency regulations, and lackadaisical enforcement.

Closing questions

Do you still want to give these wallet-pickers taxpayer-funded scientific research?

Are you also willing to let them parasitize the work of usually under-funded biomedical entrepreneurs, who do the real work of discovery?

Big Pharma — instant plutocrats from a bottle

Giant pharmaceutical corporations have managed to turn the most fundamentally good aspects of science and capitalism upside down.

Big Pharma has achieved a parasitic relationship with the American public.

In one sense, parasitism is the capitalistic profit-making ideal, but it certainly does not work to the public’s benefit.

One way to squash the blood-sucking Big out of Pharma

Given that Big Pharma is riding high on the “gimmes” provided by far too easily acquired patents and effortlessly-manipulated FDA regulations, why don’t we change those rules a bit?

And let’s insist that the courts that hear these cases and the attorneys that prosecute and defend them know the scientific basics. Right now most of them only know how to argue hot air’s illusory winds.

We will have to incentivize the people who do the real research and those who take the most significant entrepreneurial risks. Of course that means getting Pharma’s toadies out of government and the courts.

Nothing is easy, is it? But knowing where we want to go is a start.

PeteFree.com

Coming Trend — Pharmaceutical Companies as Research Parasites