The Ethical Nag

Here’s a drug marketing plan that is dazzling in its brilliant effectiveness. I’m thinking of including it in any future PR workshops I do on marketing communications. It’s a plan to sell pills to treat something called osteopenia, a condition that only recently started to be thought of as a problem that even needs treatment. It’s a plan to convince consumers and their physicians that these pills should be in the medicine cabinets of millions of women worldwide. But more broadly, it’s a plan to change the definition of what a disease is, and the role that drug companies can play in that change.

Until the mid-1990s, only a handful of people had even heard of osteopenia.  It is defined as a slight thinning of the bones that occurs naturally as women get older, and typically does not result in bone breaks.

But drug giant Merck wanted to sell a whole lot more of their drug Fosamax, prescribed to treat those already diagnosed with osteoporosis, a disease (mostly seen in the elderly) that can cause bones to become more porous and to break more easily. It was particularly important at that time, because Merck’s patent protection on the drug was due to expire in 2008, thus opening the door to cheaper generics and plummeting profits.

In order to pitch Fosamax by linking the benign condition of osteopenia with the legitimate one of osteoporosis, Merck would need a marketing plan, and a hotshot to work the plan.

So Merck hired super-sales guy Jeremy Allen to help position Fosamax as a ‘cure’ for the new ’disease’ of osteopenia. 

To convince large numbers of middle-aged women that they needed to take Fosamax to prevent the old age bone fractures of osteoporosis, Merck first needed to convince women to get their bones scanned so they could be diagnosed with osteopenia.  How to do this?  Existing bone scanning systems were expensive, cumbersome and hard to come by. Here was Jeremy Allen’s brilliant marketing plan in a nutshell:  Read more…

Those feisty pharmaceutical industry insiders at Fierce Pharma have released their annual list of bestselling prescription drugs. The five drugs that accounted for the most frequently dispensed prescriptions include four generic drugs and just one brand name product–and that brand saw prescriptions drop. Here’s the list, with the number of ’scrips’ written in 2008 and the previous year for comparison’s sake:  

• 1. Hydrocodone with acetaminophen, generic painkiller, 124 million scrips in 2008, up from 119 million in 2007.
• 2. Lisinopril, generic blood pressure medication, 75.5 million, up from 70.5 million in 2007
• 3. Simvastatin, generic cholesterol remedy, 66.7 million, up from 47.7 million in 2007
• 4. Levothyroxine sodium, generic thyroid hormone, 61.4 million, up from 55 million in 2007
• 5. Lipitor, Pfizer’s branded cholesterol medication, 57.9 million, down from 65.1 million in 2007

Now for the dollar figures. As you might guess, all of the top-dollar meds are brand-name drugs, simply because branded meds are so much more expensive to purchase. Here are the top five, listed with their manufacturer, purpose and previous year’s sales:

• Lipitor, Pfizer, cholesterol: $7.8 billion, down from $8.1 billion in 2007
• Nexium, AstraZeneca, heartburn/gastric reflux: $5.9 billion, up from $5.5 billion in 2007
• Plavix, Bristol-Myers Squibb, blood thinner: $4.9 billion, up from $3.9 billion in 2007
• Advair Diskus, GlaxoSmithKline, asthma/COPD: $4.4 billion, up from $4.3 billion in 2007
• Seroquel, AstraZeneca, atypical antipsychotic: $3.9 billion, up from $3.5 billion in 2007

Read more on these lists.