Our Views

Replacing unethical marketing with evidence-based science could, in the longer term, put a lot of money back into Big Pharma’s R&D pocket.

Shahram Ahari, the former Ely Lilly sales rep who went public with his tales of how Big Pharma’s marketing tactics target doctors with everything from gifts to possible sexual favors (see our earlier blog) has joined the group PharmedOut, an independent, publicly funded project that wants to help physicians identify and counter Big Pharma’s inappropriate pharmaceutical promotion practices. The group has released a free, web-based Continuing Medical Education (CNE) course to educate doctors about generic drugs and the drug approval process.

PharmedOut also wants to see unethical marketing replaced by evidence-based science — something we’ve been saying all along. If the Food and Drug Administration’s drug testing and approvals system ensured that Big Pharma’s products were thoroughly tested before releasing them, these kinds of marketing tactics could become unnecessary.

PharmedOut is being funded by money from a 2004 legal settlement between Warner-Lambert, a division of Pfizer, Inc., and the Attorneys General of 50 States and the District of Columbia over allegations that Warner-Lambert conducted an unlawful marketing campaign for the drug Neurontin. But according to some comments at the blog PharmaGossip, this kind of funding may be tainted because it comes, however indirectly, from Big Pharma. And after it’s gone, how will funding continue?

Regardless of PharmedOut’s funding, its intentions seem on the money. Reliable drug testing and full disclosure would remove doubts about a drug’s efficacy or safety, doctors would be free to prescribe a drug with more certainty, and the public would benefit from better drugs and lower health care costs.

Such a system would see Big Pharma having to continue spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing a drug — that’s a given that won’t change. But it could save a lot of the $7 billion it spends trying to sell its drugs to doctors — roughly $8,800 per physician — in a market place already glutted with poorly-evidenced drugs. That money could be ploughed back into R&D budgets already pinched by patent expirations and competition from generics.

Even more R&D money could be derived from efficient, longer-term testing and approvals. Better tested drugs could save billions in legal settlements over drugs that turn out to be less than perfectly safe, and more billions in settlements over Big Pharma’s corporate and executive culpability for crossing legal and ethical lines promoting poorly tested and under- or falsely-reported test results.

The ideal of evidence-based science driving prescribing decisions can only come about if the onus is placed back on Big Pharma, the FDA and appropriate lawmakers to develop better, safer testing and approvals. However difficult it may be, there is no other way to get some shine back into Big Pharma’s tarnished image. It could be what’s needed to save the industry from the extinction it surely faces without some fundamental changes.

Popularity: 29% [?]