Monthly Archives: December 2009

“Where There’s Smoke, There’s Pfizer”: growing protests against appointment of Big Pharma exec to research funding agency

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
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This news could be compared to inviting the fox to be in charge of the henhouse.  Except that it’s more like inviting the fox right into the henhouse to relax, put up his feet, and help himself to a three-year supply of Buffalo wings. That’s why opposition continues to mount this week against the Canadian government’s questionable appointment of a top pharmaceutical executive to the council governing Canada’s largest health research agency. Thousands of people, including several prominent medical ethicists and researchers, have signed a petition this week calling for the withdrawal of the appointment of Dr. Bernard Prigent, vice-president and medical director of Pfizer Canada, to the governing council of the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, which has a $1-billion annual budget funding the work of thousands of medical researchers across Canada.

The publicly-funded CIHR awards grants to researchers across the country working in health and medicine. Its governing council consists mainly of scientists, medical practitioners and health administrators drawn from Canadian universities.  And now, drawn from Big Pharma too.  Continue reading →

Pens, pizza, parties: how Big Pharma freebies impact your doctor

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
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For many years, pharmaceutical companies have supplied free lunches – and even fridges to store them in – in the student lounges of Canadian medical schools. Well, if the association that represents Canada’s medical schools has anything to say about it, there really will be no such thing as a free lunch – at least for medical students. This also means no more talks given by physician experts paid by pharmaceutical companies. No more unsupervised meetings with drug reps.  Recently, several other university medical centres such as Yale University have also barred drug company sales reps from bringing free lunches to staff physicians. (Yale might have been motivated to do so by the recent ‘C’ grade it recently received from the American Medical Student Association, a national group that rates how well medical schools monitor and control drug industry money). And in September, Stanford University (which rated a ‘B’ grade) announced that its physicians will no longer be able to accept gifts of any size from any type of vendor, including drug companies and medical device makers. Ethicist Dr. Richard Popp at Stanford’s biodesign program explained:

“It’s a slippery slope from pens and Post-Its to bigger gifts. It is more clearcut just to say don’t take anything.’”    Continue reading →

Do you want to take medications made in China?

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
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Let’s say you are a heart attack survivor like me, who must now take a fistful of cardiac drugs every day.  And let’s say one of them is Crestor, a drug manufactured by the U.K – Sweden based pharmaceutical company, AstraZeneca. But today you learn that AstraZeneca plans to move all drug production of its ”active pharmaceutical ingredients” from the U.K. to China.

Next, you find out that the world’s biggest drug company, Pfizer – manufacturer of both Norvasc (your calcium channel blocker drug) and Accuretic (your ACE inhibitor) – is doing the same thing.

Pfizer plans to close its Connecticut plant and expand operations in Wuhan, China, where hundreds of new jobs will be added.  Pfizer is also expanding in Shanghai.

The list gets longer. The drugmaker Novartis (creator of many ‘over the counter’ drugs like Maalox, ExLax, Buckley’s, Bufferin, as well as generic prescription drugs like amoxicillin and fentanyl) has just announced a $1 billion investment that will create China’s largest pharmaceutical plant. Eli Lilly (makers of many diabetes drugs, plus Cymbalta, Prozac, Cialis) has just axed 5,500 North American jobs, and is adding 2,000 jobs at its China plants. Contract drug sales rep firms are ramping up in China to serve these companies.

Outsourcing to China is part of a disturbing Big Pharma trend. Drug companies with massive Western operations are shutting them down and moving them to China to reduce costs. The question you should be asking now is: “How will our government regulators monitor drug safety if all the factories are in China?” Continue reading →

Selling ‘Me-Too’ drugs that don’t meet any unmet medical needs

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
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pills spoonFor stock market analyst David Amsellem, keeping a close eye on drug companies is what he likes to do. In fact, the Senior Research Analyst at the investment firm Piper Jaffray & Co. is recognized as the number-one-ranked analyst in North America for “accuracy of earnings estimates in the pharmaceuticals sector” according to the 2008 Financial Times/StarMine ‘Best Brokerage Analyst’ survey.

So he’s also pretty good at sizing up the drug industry – particularly ‘specialty pharma’ companies. These are companies making expensive brand name drugs for chronic conditions or complex care issues like cancer, HIV-AIDS, hemophilia and other bleeding disorders, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and others.

Specialty pharmaceutical companies usually focus the majority of their efforts on one or two therapeutic areas that are served by specialized physicians. Their traditional mode of operation is to acquire under-promoted branded products from Big Pharma companies that are generating lower sales, and then try to significantly increase revenues through aggressive targeted marketing and promotional activities.

Writing in the 2009 Wall Street Transcripts Pharmaceuticals Report, Mr. Amsellem calls a spade a spade, in ways that are interesting not only to stock market investors, but to those of us whose doctors have ever written us a prescription for any name brand medication.

“Drug companies that are developing products that are not necessarily differentiated, that are more ‘me-too’ type products, that are not necessarily addressing major unmet medical needs, are finding it more and more difficult to get adequate compensation.” Continue reading →