Santa’s little helper Maxine Vaccine offers some festive thoughts on the good, the bad and the ugly in the world of pharmaceuticals.
This week’s most eye-catching pharma news is that the leader of a Texan counterfeit drugs outfit who smuggled thousands of fake Viagra and Cialis pills into the US from China and sold them online was jailed for 13 months and ordered to pay $140,000 in restitution to Pfizer and Eli Lilly.
In the USA, Viagra pills are sold legitimately for about $20 each – but the bogus pills were sold for half that. However, they probably did work in the most literal sense. Bill Donnelly, Pfizer’s chief of anti-counterfeiting for North America, commented that drug counterfeiters “are more likely to put too much active ingredient” so that “people will buy it again”.
What the counterfeiters ignore is the regulatory framework that ensures product safety and consistency. Given that Viagra can cause violent headaches and nausea, and is dangerous for anyone with a heart condition, only an idiot would take even the real thing without a prescription.
But there are quite a few idiots out there. Over four million counterfeit Viagra tablets were seized worldwide in 2010.
Of course, you’re not an idiot, and there won’t be any counterfeit drugs in your Christmas stocking. But this is a good time to reflect on what the pharma industry does well and what it’s capable of getting wrong.
This year we’ve seen progress towards the development of a vaccine against HIV infection, while the impact of anti-retroviral drugs has seen rates of HIV infection begin to fall worldwide.
Intensive R&D in the cancer therapy field has seen the evolution of a long-term condition treatment model for a disease that, in previous generations, had few survivors.
The UK government has highlighted the potential of stratified medicine, using genetic analysis to develop targeted drugs, to transform healthcare and create major commercial opportunities for UK life science companies.
While the swine flu vaccine may, in retrospect, have been overused, it’s good to know that the industry came up with a rapid solution to what could in theory have been a much greater problem.
So why do thousands of people click ‘like’ at every scandal story involving a pharma company? If pharma were a person its Facebook relationship status would vacillate between ‘single’ and ‘it’s complicated’. What’s wrong?
For a start, before the advent of ‘designer drugs’ every illegal drug on the black market was developed as a pharmaceutical product. Heroin, amphetamine, cocaine, barbiturates, tranquillisers – they were all on prescription once, and some of them still are. Addiction is something the industry, the medical professional and the public are still learning about.
The Verve song ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’ was indeed about chemotherapy, not narcotics – and there’s another reason drug companies are unloved. Drugs don’t always work, because people and their diseases are not predictable. Every patient is unique, and we ignore that at our peril. Medicine is not about spreadsheets and statistics, it’s about the human body – which nobody can control.
The trouble with drugs is that people see them as quick-fix solutions to problems that have complex causes. Instead of recognising that any drug can affect only certain narrow chemical parameters, increasing this and reducing that, shifting the balance of a complex dynamic system, we continue to look for ‘magic bullets’. That’s as much a problem with patients and doctors as with suppliers – but we get the blame, and we may sometimes deserve it.
The pharma industry’s future doesn’t lie in more blockbuster drugs, in corporate branding, or in NLP. It lies in consultation and the sharing of knowledge, in open innovation, in honest engagement between professionals with different areas of expertise. Only bad sales professionals try to get around the customer’s knowledge. Good sales professionals engage with it and add to it.
Drugs are imperfect. People are imperfect. All we can do is make connections, identify problems and work together towards solving them. The more we can do that, the less pain there will be.
Or maybe I’ve just opened the sherry a few days early.
Have a great Yuletide break and I’ll see you next year.
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