posted
I'm reading a book on the collusion between drug companies and medical reseachers. The author's thesis is that the influx of targeted donating from interested parties skews research to the public's detriment. Examples of how these corporate donations have pushed dubious drugs into the marketplace are Rezulin, Redux(or fen-phen), Retin-A, and Neurontin.
1) Companies will donate to University labs, only if the company gets to determine a given study's procedure.
2) Companies will donate to University labs, only if the company gets veto rights on the study before it's published.
3) Companies will pre-select researchers who have had a history of being favorable to a given product or method, thereby increasing the chances of a favorable finding for a given drug.
4) University researchers will form start-up companies, and gain exclusive licenses to innovations that were developed in a publically funded laboratory.
5) The consistent wine and dining of medical students to increase the name recognition of a specific drug.
6) The ghost writing of journal articles. A company will write a piece, then send the piece, supporting data, and a check to a renown professor in the field, for professors to evaluate and submit under their own names. The problem being that the data released by the company may not be the complete data set.
7) A University will invest in the company or the patent, thereby subtlely pressing for favorable, or at least profitable, results.
8) A University will invest in a lab based on the likelihood of profitable results that could come from a patent. The down side of this is that other, scientifically interesting but not immediately profitable reseach will go unfunded.
__________
Apparently, in the mid 70s, a guy from Stanford and a Prof from UCSF discovered how to transfer genetic material from a toad to bacterium, getting it to replicate, in essence, creating bacteria that could serve as living factories for human protein. Stanford and UCSF made 300 million dollars off of the royalty fees from the patent, since every lab who wanted to use the recombinant gene technology had to give over a small fee.
That windfall, and the vast amount of money now floating around the healthcare and biotechnology areas, influences the priorites we place on science.
The proponents of licensing say that the exclusive patents give private industry a motive to invest in laboratories and further develop the products into workable solutions for the common man. The opponents say that introducing this aspect of business culture into scientific research poisons the open and atmosphere necessary for revolutionary scientific breakthroughs.
The same could be said about energy, since so many of the promininent research labs, universities, and professors, are financially entangled in the oil industiry.
Do any of these concerns resonate with anyone who works within the industry?
posted
Short answer: I'm as concerned about the pharmaceutical-medical complex as I am about the military-industrial complex.
Long answer: Will take a while. Right now I'm on my way out with my honey, but I will get back to this. Posts: 132 | Registered: Jun 2006
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posted
The problem is that these physician/industry ties erode public trust in the medical profession. It wasn't too long ago, about a hundred years, before the AMA tightened standards, that American doctors weren't taken seriously, because it was too hard to tell legitimate doctors from snake-oil salesmen. In general, the position of doctor is relatively newly esteemed.
One of my favorite columnists here shows how both improprieties and the appearance of improprieties on the part of medical professionals can do a disservice to the medical profession.
The problem isn't the casual medical/industry association, it's the infusion of the profit motive into the heart the medical research, where drug companies are paying doctors 1,000 to 5,000 dollar finders fees per test subject, which is starting to influence the doctor's treatment priorities to the detriment of the public these medical professionals ostensibly serve.
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Sara, I just wrote you an email that was returned undeliverable. Will you email your current email address to me at TheTatiana AT gmail DOT com? Thanks!
Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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posted
Irami, not only do I have a basic (very basic) medical background, but I have seen some of this from another angle.
From the restaurant business.
Hear me out, I promise it isn't as far fetched as it sounds.
I worked for a high-end restaurant that catered a lot of functions. Some of our best clients were the pharmaceutical companies. They would spend enormous amounts of money throwing dinner lectures for doctors. We would at times see the same doctors 3-4 times in a single week, sponging up the free lobsters and drinks. Some of them knew the routine so well that we would know that they were going to order not just one but TWO triple-stuffed lobsters, at $90 each, and take one home, every time.
These same doctors would then go out and give trial drugs to their patients, and then suggest specific drug treatments to their patients.
I know that the pharmaceutical companies thought that the dinners were worth it, as they came back over and over again for the two years I worked there. I also understand their very practical problems...without these dinners, doctors were a pain in the ass, and rarely looked into new treatment options.
On a side note, you should have seen some of the looks I would get while cleaning up after the party. I would ask the ones I knew well about their drugs, and they were always surprised that I asked intelligent questions. One of them told me I asked tougher questions than any doctor he had ever entertained.
That scared me. Not that I am stupid....far from it....but what type of questions were they asking to these companies then?
Not every good ones. It might have meant they wouldn't be asked back for more lobster.
Posts: 15082 | Registered: Jul 2001
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That's the problem with this sort of advertising. You can't really gauge if it's affecting the doctor's prescription practices, but it doesn't take an MBA to know that there is some sort of conditioning going on. ___________
I do think that the biggest danger is that private interests will start to dictate the research priorities of public schools. We are in a bad way when University Professors are primarily guided by conducting research that will more easily allow this given Professor to start his/her own start-up company.
Posts: 5600 | Registered: Jul 2001
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posted
At the hospital that I work at, drugs reps are not allowed except under specific conditions. Usually education related.
I do believe that drug companies spend too much money on marketing.
However, I have to give some kudos to drug companies. They return more of their profits to research and development than any other industry. It is their life blood. If they do not constantly develop new medications, then eventually their source of income disappears when patents run out.
A typical drug now days takes more than a billion dollars to develop. Several of the patent years are used up before the drug ever gets marketed.
I do believe that unethical business practices occur. I feel (just my opinion) that most of the unethical stuff happens on the marketing side of things, not the research side (usually).
And I'm not too worried about the marketing side nearly as much as the research side. With Rezulin, Redux, Retin-A, and Neurotin, it wasn't the marketing that was the major issue, it was private interests meddling with the approval process, from the doctors conducting the research through the FDA, that resulted in those fiascos. Drug companies spend incredible amounts of money on the development side, but on the research end, their money is often mingled with tax payer money in University laboratories, with the company gaining exclusive rights.
A major problem is the fundamental level at which drug companies are funding Universities, and gaining exclusive patents which preclude scientific research at other Universities. In the companies defense, corporate intrusion into the Universities is not so much an issue of the fox stealing into the hen house as much as the fox being invited in the hen house. What's even worse, Universities are starting to behave like a for-profit business to get in on the action.
quote:Consider the University of Wisconsin's recent handling of a breakthrough discovery in the field of stem cell research. In the 1990s Professor James Thompson, working under a federal grant from the National Institutes of Health, succeeded in deriving stem cells from rhesus monkeys and macaques. The discover generated enormous excitement within the scientific community, as these primitive cells can turn into virtuallny any tyupe of tissue or organ and thus may have enormous potential value in the treatment of degenerative diseases such as multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's. By 1998, however, the university's technological-licensing arm - the Wisconsin Research Foundation (WARF)- had succeeded in obtaining an exceptionally broad patent on Thompson's discovery, cover all lines of embryonic stem cells for primates (including humans), along with the actual method for isolating them. The patent gave WARF the power to determine which U.S.-based scientists could work with primate embryonic stem cells, under what conditions, and for what purpose. Rather than making its stem cells available to everyone on a nonexclusive basis, WARF elected to license six of the most medically significant cell types that could be grown from thise lines-- liver, muscle, nerve, pancreas, blood, and bone- exlusively to the Geron Corporation, based in Menlo Park, California.
Katharina, You need a subscription to read the Elliot article. It looks like it's well-written, though.
quote: “Yet many [drug]reps are so friendly, so easygoing, so much fun to flirt with that it is virtually impossible to demonize them. How can you demonize someone who brings you lunch and touches your arm and remembers your birthday and knows the names of all your children?
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