big pharma
revere | November 26, 2007Indonesia's health minister, Siti Fadilah Supari, has answered the question whether the recently concluded Geneva summit on sharing of influenza viruses had produced sufficient agreement to induce that country to begin sharing again. Her answer seems to be "no":
Indonesia's health minister reiterated Sunday that she would not send bird flu specimens to the World Health Organization, saying poor nations needed assurances that any pandemic vaccines developed from the virus would be affordable.
Siti Fadilah Supari made the comments on her return from Geneva, where the WHO held an…
revere | November 24, 2007As you will see from the account below the fold, the flu summit was a contentious and complicated affair. Only time will tell if it was even a qualified success, but there are reasons to be hopeful. Tip of the hat to Ed Hammond, one of the NGO participants, who provided the public health community with his perspective at a time when no one else was talking. This involved late hours for him at the end of long days. We are grateful.
Here's his wrap-up:
Influenza Meeting Ends in Qualified Success
At the end of contentious meetings like the one on policies for sharing flu virus it is tempting to…
revere | November 24, 2007Yesterday was the fourth and final day of the important Geneva summit on sharing flu virus isolates. Like premature news of Mark Twain's death, the Reuters report the meeting had failed was exaggerated. On the contrary, the summit appeared to have moved things forward. We have the latest, below. You can find previous happenings and background here, here, here and here.
Status mid-day, Day 4 (3:26 pm Geneva time, November 23), as reported by Ed Hammond:
Some Things That Happened in the Night Session of Day 3 and Morning Session of Day 4
These sessions were the final negotiations before…
revere | November 20, 2007If a rogue H5N1 virus easiy tansmissible between people is to develop, the most plausible spot for it to happen is Indonesia, the world's fourth most populous with a vast reservoir of infected poultry (and who knows what else) and more human cases (113) and more deaths (91) than any other country. But Indonesia still refuses to share its human H5N1 isolates, contending they get nothing tangible from an arrangement which is likely to lead to vaccines they won't be able to afford. Under the current system, which allows intellectual property rights to cover vaccines developed from WHO supplied…
revere | November 16, 2007It's been a while since we discussed the Avastin-Lucentis controversy, but the battle has been taken up by another blogger, Howard Brody at Hooked:
Quick overview--Genentech, the biotech firm, is maker of a very successful drug (brand name: Avastin) that is quite useful in colon cancer. The drug works by counteracting the tendency of tumors to create a lot of new, small blood vessels to keep the growing tumor supplied with blood. Some smart person figured out that the eye disease called wet macular degeneration is caused by a similar proliferation of new blood vessels and so the same sort of…
revere | October 25, 2007The "experts" have spoken to WHO and WHO has spoken to us: because of the march of science, there's been a large upswing in the estimates of how much vaccine the world could produce in a pandemic -- if such a vaccine existed and there was a way to deliver it. But if there was one and it could be delivered, then WHO thinks we could produce up to a 4.5 billion doses by 2010 as a result of new manufacturing technologies and techniques to make the produced antigen go farther. A lot of "ifs," to be sure, but without the ability to make the stuff the rest doesn't matter.
At the moment we make a…
revere | October 20, 2007The Erectile Dysfunction (ED) drugs already carry the required warnings we know from our misspent youth: Warning: you can go blind doing this. Okay, it says you may experience sudden loss of vision. Same thing. Now a new warning is being added: Warning: it might make you hard -- of hearing:
The impotence drugs Viagra, Cialis and Levitra will get prominent warnings on the risk of sudden hearing loss, U.S. regulators said.
[snip]
The FDA found 29 reports of sudden hearing loss in people who took the erectile dysfunction drugs since 1996. More than 40 million people worldwide have used the…
revere | October 1, 2007Adverse drug reactions often appear idiosyncratic. Some drugs have powerful effects and everyone experiences the side effects (e.g., cancer chemotherapeutic agents). Others, however, seem to disagree with only a few people, although that disagreement can be major. Obviously drug companies would rather not have to contend with the fallout that occurs when their customers become collateral damage. Much of the controversy over drugs like Vioxx is how much the companies knew about that damage and what they did with that knowledge. Big Pharma would rather the blame the drug failure on the victim…
revere | September 7, 2007Chemical & Engineering News, a publication of the American Chemical Society, has issued a news release about one of their news items. And this is a news piece about their news release about their news item. Think you can remember that? If not, you might want to read their news release about their news item, but in the meantime, here is my news piece about their news release about their news item:
In our aging society, with an increased urgency to develop new compounds that target serious illnesses like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, memory enhancement drugs are becoming a big…
revere | August 27, 2007We in public health need all the advocates we can get, so it's heartening to know that a major pharmaceutical company, Allergan, Inc., has hired a big name lobbying firm to "lobby on public health issues":
Allergan Inc., which makes eye care products and Botox anti-wrinkle injections, hired McKenna, Long & Aldridge to lobby the federal government.
The firm is expected to lobby on public health issues, according to a form posted online Aug. 8 by the Senate's public records office.
Under a federal law enacted in 1995, lobbyists are required to disclose activities that could influence…
revere | July 27, 2007This may be the most hilarious headline I have ever seen:
Insane donor 'rational to give to Tories'
I'm not sure if it is exactly correct to call Britain's Tories (the Conservative Party) the counterpart to the Republicans in the US, but they are at least the primary opposition to the Labour Party, which bears a faint resemblance to the US Democratic Party (including having had a Bush enabler at the helm). So I'll make the comparison anyway, even though I know someone is going to comment how I "know nothing" about British politics. I'll give you my riposte ahead of time: Get a life. Anyway.…
revere | June 24, 2007There's been a bit of a buzz about a paper by Australian researcher Jennifer McKimm-Breschkin at the Toronto flu meetings last week. McKimm-Breschkin told the gathering of 1500 flu obsessed scientists just what they didn't want to hear: that she and her colleagues had evidence from the laboratory that clade 2 H5N1 avian influenza virus isolated from birds in Indonesia were becoming resistant to the only oral antiviral effective against the virus, oseltamivir (Tamiflu). In comparison to clade 1 (southeast asian) virus from a few years back, the sensitivity was 20 to 30 times less.
We'll have…
revere | June 22, 2007With all the concern about contamination of imported food ingredients, especially from a major exporter like China, you'd think the US Food and Drug Administration would be eager to make whatever information it has available to US food producers as quickly as possible. You know what's coming next:
Lee Sanders, a senior vice president with the American Bakers Association, requested FDA documents on imported honey in 2002. The Washington-based association wanted to know about a pesticide in honey imported from China, she said in an interview.
"You would hope that those types of requests would…
revere | June 21, 2007The prospect of a influenza pandemic has concentrated the minds of vaccine makers. There has been a lot of new research and development on newer, faster and cheaper ways to make flu vaccines. The antiviral field hasn't been quite as active, although now things seem to be picking up. Until now the antivirals (all four of them!) have been in two main classes, the old M2 inhibitors (adamantanes) and the newer neuraminidase inhibitors (oseltamivir, zanamivir; and waiting in the wings, peramivir). Now we are hearing about new drug targets:
One of the promising things about the work is that the…
revere | May 23, 2007Thailand wants to provide free medicines for drugs and heart disease to its poorest citizens. That sounds good to me. Apparently my government doesn't agree:
Thailand's Public Health Minister said U.S. trade officials didn't relent on their opposition to his plan to copy drugs made by companies including Abbott Laboratories and Merck & Co. after meetings in Washington.
Mongkol Na Songkhla met with Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez and Deputy U.S. Trade Representative John K. Veroneau yesterday in an effort to avoid retaliation against a plan to invoke a World Trade Organization…
revere | April 27, 2007It was inevitable. Roche is now planning to cut production of its antiviral Tamiflu because, they say, supply is exceeding demand:
Swiss pharmaceutical group Roche said Thursday it would trim production of the frontline bird flu drug Tamiflu unless demand picked up, but warned that the world was still not ready for a pandemic.
Manufacturing capacity for the antiviral treatment has reached 400 million treatment courses a year and is outstripping demand, William Burns, the chief executive of the group's pharmaceuticals division told journalists.
Roche has received orders for 215 million…
revere | March 30, 2007Tamiflu side effects have been much in the news and we have concurrently been posting our mega-series on modeling antiviral resistance in influenza control. The two subjects are related in two ways, one obvious (Tamiflu is the main antiviral being stockpiled for influenza control) and one not so obvious: both topics are related to the fact that million, tens of millions or hundreds of millions of doses are contemplated. For antiviral resistance this means even very rare mutations producing a fully transmission-competent resistant virus can spread widely through the population (you will see…
revere | March 29, 2007GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) is said to be the second largest pharmaceutical and food company in the world. They make and market an influenza antiviral (Relenza) and an H5N1 vaccine. We trust that they represent their products to the public and to public officials correctly. Maybe we shouldn't. At least not on the basis evidence adduced by two 14 year old New Zealand school girls:
Jenny and Anna decided to look at vitamin C content in juice for the Manukau Institute of Technology science fair because "we were both going through a juice phase".
Jenny said the Ribena ready-to-drink product was one of…
revere | March 12, 2007We've discussed the problem of an affordable vaccine for the developing world several times (here, here, here). We advocate ten to a dozen regional international vaccine institutes to make influenza vaccine at cost, license and patent free. Another suggestion has come from Dr. Carl Nathan from Cornell Medical College in a Commentary published in Nature Medicine and summarized at the Cornell news site:
Weill Cornell Medical College scientist Dr. Carl Nathan has issued a bold call for reforming the pharmaceutical development and patent systems in order to increase the number of vaccines and…
revere | March 7, 2007Name brand drugs got more expensive last year. A lot more expensive.
Prices for the 200 brand-name drugs most commonly used by the U.S. elderly rose an average of 6.2 percent last year, almost twice as much as the rate of inflation, a report says.
Sanofi-Aventis SA increased the price of its sleeping pill Ambien 30 percent, more than any other medication of the 200, the AARP, a lobbying group for people 50 and older, said in a report today. Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals Inc. boosted the price of its Combivent inhaler for lung disease 18 percent, the second-biggest increase.
The AARP,…