Large Prescription Drug Companies Lack Innovation In New Drug Development,Wall Street Journal Letter States

Main Category: Pharma Industry / Biotech Industry
Article Date: 08 Jul 2008 - 9:00 PDT

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Large drug companies that "license or otherwise acquire discoveries from universities or small biotech companies, then develop them for commercial production and sponsor the clinical research necessary for FDA," are "hardly creative in the scientific sense," Marcia Angell of Harvard Medical School writes in a Wall Street Journal letter to the editor in response to an opinion piece published on June 28 (Angell, Wall Street Journal, 7/7).

Benjamin Zycher, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, in the opinion piece wrote that it is "current mythology" that "most drug innovation comes from publicly funded research." He wrote, "All or almost all of the drugs and drug classes would not have been developed -- or their development would have been delayed significantly -- in the absence of the scientific or technical contributions of pharmaceutical firms" (Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, 6/30).

According to Angell, "[T]he examples of innovation (Zycher) cites date back to the 1980s or earlier," adding, "Nearly every top-selling drug today has progenitors dating back many years, often based on NIH-funded research in universities." She continues, "The problem with this sequence -- publicly funded innovation handed off to the drug companies -- is that the industry expects to be rewarded as though it were the source of innovation, pricing drugs as high as the traffic will bear and doing everything possible to extend its exclusive marketing rights." Angell concludes, "The only really innovative thing about" the pharmaceutical industry today "is the claims of its apologists" (Wall Street Journal, 7/7).

Reprinted with kind permission from http://www.kaisernetwork.org. You can view the entire Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, search the archives, or sign up for email delivery at http://www.kaisernetwork.org/dailyreports/healthpolicy. The Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report is published for kaisernetwork.org, a free service of The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

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