How Pharmaceutical Companies Fool Consumers with Me-Too Drugs

I recently listed to an excellent podcast interview of Dr. Marcia Angell by Russ Roberts on Econtalk about the pharmaceutical industry. She is a former editor of the New England Journal and a pathologist by training (see: Angell on Big Pharma). In the interview, she makes a strong case that these companies are not particularly innovative and often quite unscrupulous in their marketing practices. She is a long-time critic of the industry. To support her claim, she discusses "Me-Too" drugs. Here's an excerpt from another article that makes the same points as Dr. Angell (see: Sometimes they're just the same old, same old): It’s expensive to produce an innovative drug. On average, the bill runs to more than $400 million. So drug companies often take a less costly route to create a new product. They chemically rejigger an oldie but goodie, craft a new name, mount a massive advertising campaign and sell the retread as the latest innovative breakthrough. This strategy has shown great success for turning profits. Nexium, a “me-too” drug for stomach acid, has earned $3.9 billion for its maker, AstraZeneca, since it went on the market in 2001. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration classified three-fourths of the 119 drugs it approved last year as similar to existing ones in chemical makeup or therapeutic value....Many chemicals come in two versions, each a mirror image of the other: an L-isomer and an R-isomer....Nexium’s predecessor Prilosec is a mixtur...
Source: Lab Soft News - Category: Pathologists Authors: Tags: Healthcare Business Medical Ethics Pharmaceutical Industry Source Type: blogs