I was going to take the time to write a follow up diary in response to the self-aggrandizing comments that I had read in my previous diary, saying how valuable pharma companies are, and how they are god’s gift to humanity, and we should all thank them for our lives. But the news just wont’ let me wait, so I’ll just put it out there.
Johnson & Johnson shares plunge after report that says it knew about asbestos in its baby powder. www.cnn.com/...
We need congress to massively increase NIH budget so we can do publicly owned research and development, and we can then license the manufacturing to pill factories. We need our drugs to be generic and cheap and publicly owned! We don’t need scum bag big pharma!
Grand total $32,505,488. Who says Universities can’t afford to run their own clinical trials? They do it all the time, if the stinking pharma wouldn’t buy off politicians to cut NIH funding!
As at most other US research universities, Stanford faculty receive support primarily from contracts and grants funded by federal agencies such as the National Institute of Health, National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, and Department of Defense, with other support from companies, foundations and to a limited extent from state and local agencies. About 6000 externally sponsored projects directed by Stanford faculty are expected to have approximately $1 billion in funding for 2016-17. doresearch.stanford.edu/...
With $1 billion a year, and cost of 32 million each, Stanford alone could run 30 clinical trials a year!
less than 30 billion a year spent on R&D. With 30 universities like Stanford, we can do our own R&D. We don’t need no stinking pill factory (asbestos contaminators!) to do research for us!!!
Top 3 pharma companies spent less than 30 billion a year on R&D. With 30 universities like Stanford, we can do our own R&D. We don’t need no stinking pill factory (asbestos contaminators!) to do research for us!!! They spend all their money on marketing!
Doctors don’t need your stinking marketing! We get our information and education from guidelines developed by our professional organizations, and we read our journals and do our CMEs. If there is any new medication or treatment, we learn about it through proper channels, not through your stupid glitzy ads that clutter our journals, and certainly not from your stupid TV ads!
And take your disgusting lunches and shove them!
When patients see your stupid idiotic ads on TV, they get bad information and they get fixated on needing some drug they heard about on TV. Then we have to take time to (re)educate them and tell them they don’t need some stinking drug. I read in the comments of my other diary an argument that patients heard about prostate screening from pharma ads so they asked about getting tested by their doctor! We don’t need no stinking TV ads for patients to report urinary symptoms! If they have symptoms they’d come and tell us about it. I see them every week.
NO IT IS NOT
Erosion of Funding for the National Institutes of Health Threatens U.S. Leadership in Biomedical Research www.americanprogress.org/...
The vast majority of NIH funding supports research conducted in universities and the private sector through the NIH Office of Extramural Research, or OER. In FY 2013, roughly 81 percent of the NIH budget funded extramural research through research grants, research training, and research and development contracts. This funding is awarded through roughly 50,000 competitive grants and supports more than 300,000 researchers in universities and research institutions around the world. OER supports research programs such as Vanderbilt University’s AIDS Clinical Trials Unit and the Accelerating Medicines Partnership, a public-private partnership between the NIH, the Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, private industry, and non-profit organizations to “speed up the search for treatments for some of the world’s most devastating diseases—Alzheimer’s, type 2 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis and lupus.”
We don’t need the pill pushers to do our R&D!
As long as the spending caps imposed by the Budget Control Act of 2011 remain in place, it would be unrealistic to envision putting NIH funding back onto this long-term growth trend without crowding out other discretionary spending priorities. Yet even far more conservative scenarios would require significant increases in NIH funding in order to keep pace with the cost of biomedical research into the future.
Austerity is a scam. Increase NIH budget! Get rid of big pharma and their asbestos baby powder!
As we previously reported, pharmaceutical companies spend more money on marketing drugs than research and development. Johnson & Johnson for example recently spent $17.5 billion on marketing and only $8.2 billion on research and development. Similarly Pfizer spent $11.4 billion on marketing and only $6.6 billion on research and development. [2]
Deloitte’s research into a total of 12 pharmaceutical companies’ R&D expenditures for the previous year is telling, even though the comparatively small amount of money spent on R&D isn’t paying off for Big Pharma like it used to.
According to the Pew Charitable Trusts, more than $27 billion was spent on marketing to physicians by the pharmaceutical industry in the year 2012. You can do a search to find out if your doctor has been taking money from Big Pharma.
According to a report in BMJ, prescription drug companies aren’t putting a lot of resources toward new, groundbreaking medications, because it simply isn’t paying off. As outlined by the study authors, it seems that it is more profitable for the company to create variations of products that are already on the market.
“[P]harmaceutical research and development turns out mostly minor variations on existing drugs,” the authors write. “Sales from these drugs generate steady profits throughout the ups and downs of blockbusters coming off patents.”
What’s more, drug makers are also facing more stringent reviews of their drugs once they go to market. For example, GlaxoSmithKline was recently hit with analysis from the U.S. budget watchdog, the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, which found Glaxo’s new severe asthma therapy Nucala is overpriced by 63% or more.
Pharmaceutical research and development: what do we get for all that money?
BMJ. British medical journal (Clinical research ed.) Volume: 345 Issue: aug07 1 Page: e4348-e4348
The “innovation crisis” myth
The constant production of reports and articles about the so called innovation crisis rests on the decline in new molecular entities (defined as “an active ingredient that has never been marketed . . . in any form”) since a spike in 1996 that resulted from the clearance of a backlog of applications after large user fees from companies were introduced (fig 1). This decline ended in 2006, when approvals of new molecular entities returned to their long term mean of between 15 and 25 a year (fig 2). Even in 2005, an analysis of the data by a team at Pfizer concluded that the innovation crisis was a myth “which bears no relationship to the true innovation rates of the pharmaceutical industry.” So why did the claims and stories not abate?
A subsequent analysis also concluded that the innovation crisis was a myth and added several insights. Based on US Food and Drug Administration records, Munos found that drug companies “have delivered innovation at a constant rate for almost 60 years.” The new biologicals have been following the same pattern “in which approvals fluctuate around a constant, low level.” These data do not support frequently heard complaints about how hard it is to get any new drug approved. They also mean that neither policies considered to be obstacles to innovation (like the requirement for more extensive clinical testing) nor those regarded as promoting innovation (like faster reviews) have made much difference. Even the biotechnology revolution did not change the rate of approval of new molecular entities, though it changed strategies for drug development. Meanwhile, telling “innovation crisis” stories to politicians and the press serves as a ploy, a strategy to attract a range of government protections from free market, generic competition.
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This is the real innovation crisis: pharmaceutical research and development turns out mostly minor variations on existing drugs, and most new drugs are not superior on clinical measures. Although a steady stream of significantly superior new drugs enlarges the medicine chest from which millions benefit, medicines have also produced an epidemic of serious adverse reactions that have added to national healthcare costs.
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Data from companies, the United States National Science Foundation, and government reports indicate that companies have been spending only 1.3% of revenues on basic research to discover new molecules, net of taxpayer subsidies. More than four fifths of all funds for basic research to discover new drugs and vaccines come from public sources. Moreover, despite the industry’s frequent claims that the cost of new drug discovery is now $1.3bn (£834m; €1bn), this figure, which comes from the industry supported Tufts Center, has been heavily criticised. Half that total comes from estimating how much profit would have been made if the money had been invested in an index fund of pharmaceutical companies that increased in value 11% a year, compounded over 15 years. While used by finance committees to estimate whether a new venture is worth investing in, these presumed profits (far greater than the rise in the value of pharmaceutical stocks) should not be counted as research and development costs on which profits are to be made.
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What can be done to change the business model of the pharmaceutical industry to focus on more cost effective, safer medicines? The first step should be to stop approving so many new drugs of little therapeutic value. The European Medicines Agency (EMA) does Europe a disservice by approving 74% of all new applications based on trials designed by the companies, while keeping data about efficacy and safety secret.
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We should also fully fund the EMA and other regulatory agencies with public funds, rather than relying on industry generated user fees, to end industry’s capture of its regulator. Finally, we should consider new ways of rewarding innovation directly, such as through the large cash prizes envisioned in US Senate Bill 1137, rather than through the high prices generated by patent protection.
