| 01 January,
2004
Thanks Paul, Not surprising - watch now for all the
nutria drug combos coming out to, salvage, control, propagate and,
keep the drug scam alive. Already they are combining useless vaccines
with other vitamin and herbs and claiming that these are even more
effective than vaccines themselves. Of course the drug companies
will never do talk about the efficacy of alternative products alone...
Chris Gupta
http://www.newmediaexplorer.org/chris/2003/12/09/
drugs_do_not_work_on_most_patients.htm
Glaxo
chief: Our drugs do not work on most patients
By Steve Connor, Science Editor
08 December 2003
A senior executive with Britain's biggest drugs company has admitted
that most prescription medicines do not work on most people who
take them.
Allen Roses, worldwide vice-president of genetics at GlaxoSmithKline
(GSK), said fewer than half of the patients prescribed some of the
most expensive drugs actually derived any benefit from them.
It is an open secret within the drugs industry that most of its
products are ineffective in most patients but this is the first
time that such a senior drugs boss has gone public. His comments
come days after it emerged that the NHS drugs bill has soared by
nearly 50 per cent in three years, rising by £2.3bn a year
to an annual cost to the taxpayer of £7.2bn. GSK announced
last week that it had 20 or more new drugs under development that
could each earn the company up to $1bn (£600m) a year.
Dr Roses, an academic geneticist from Duke University in North
Carolina, spoke at a recent scientific meeting in London where he
cited figures on how well different classes of drugs work in real
patients.
Drugs for Alzheimer's disease work in fewer than one in three patients,
whereas those for cancer are only effective in a quarter of patients.
Drugs for migraines, for osteoporosis, and arthritis work in about
half the patients, Dr Roses said. Most drugs work in fewer than
one in two patients mainly because the recipients carry genes that
interfere in some way with the medicine, he said.
"The vast majority of drugs - more than 90 per cent - only
work in 30 or 50 per cent of the people," Dr Roses said. "I
wouldn't say that most drugs don't work. I would say that most drugs
work in 30 to 50 per cent of people. Drugs out there on the market
work, but they don't work in everybody."
Some industry analysts said Dr Roses's comments were reminiscent
of the 1991 gaffe by Gerald Ratner, the jewellery boss, who famously
said that his high street shops are successful because they sold
"total crap". But others believe Dr Roses deserves credit
for being honest about a little-publicised fact known to the drugs
industry for many years.
"Roses is a smart guy and what he is saying will surprise
the public but not his colleagues," said one industry scientist.
"He is a pioneer of a new culture within the drugs business
based on using genes to test for who can benefit from a particular
drug."
Dr Roses has a formidable reputation in the field of "pharmacogenomics"
- the application of human genetics to drug development - and his
comments can be seen as an attempt to make the industry realise
that its future rests on being able to target drugs to a smaller
number of patients with specific genes.
The idea is to identify "responders" - people who benefit
from the drug - with a simple and cheap genetic test that can be
used to eliminate those non-responders who might benefit from another
drug.
This goes against a marketing culture within the industry that
has relied on selling as many drugs as possible to the widest number
of patients - a culture that has made GSK one of the most profitable
pharmaceuticals companies, but which has also meant that most of
its drugs are at best useless, and even possibly dangerous, for
many patients.
Dr Roses said doctors treating patients routinely applied the trial-and-error
approach which says that if one drug does not work there is always
another one. "I think everybody has it in their experience
that multiple drugs have been used for their headache or multiple
drugs have been used for their backache or whatever.
"It's in their experience, but they don't quite understand
why. The reason why is because they have different susceptibilities
to the effect of that drug and that's genetic," he said.
"Neither those who pay for medical care nor patients want
drugs to be prescribed that do not benefit the recipient. Pharmacogenetics
has the promise of removing much of the uncertainty."
Response rates
Therapeutic area: drug efficacy rate in per cent
* Alzheimer's: 30
* Analgesics (Cox-2): 80
* Asthma: 60
* Cardiac Arrythmias: 60
* Depression (SSRI): 62
* Diabetes: 57
* Hepatits C (HCV): 47
* Incontinence: 40
* Migraine (acute): 52
* Migraine (prophylaxis)50
* Oncology: 25
* Rheumatoid arthritis50
* Schizophrenia: 60
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