redbaron

Big Pharma Maintains Illusion of Innovation

And who decides on the tradeoff? And who decides who dies as the result of non-investment in new research? And where is management held accountable for those decisions? The poor results from these management decisions affects us all in the end. We can and should do better!


On May 15 08:52 AM User 414457 wrote:

> The "pharma spending is a tradeoff between R&D and marketing"
> argument is a red herring. Marketing has one purpose and one purpose
> only, to bring in more revenue than is spent. Marketing spend is
> constantly indexed to return on investment, and if it's not generating
> sufficient ROI, it is cut. And what is said revenue used for? R&D,
> or rewards to shareholders for investing in the company.
> Please, people, let's not just parrot leftie applause lines.
>

Big Pharma Maintains Illusion of Innovation

Well written, and I agree on the concept that Big Pharma is not to be trusted. They spend way too much on drug marketing, and not nearly enough on drug research and development. With this sort of approach (as described above) to ethics and honesty, why would anyone put any faith at all in their data, when it comes to drug approvals? The previous administration allowed these companies to stack the deck within the FDA and NIH, and now that this era is coming to an end, these companies are starting to panic. I say lets go back to a previous world where drug marketing is severly restricted, and spend the money saved on drug development instead of back to back to back to back drug ads on TV. Perhaps such measures would give us some new drugs, and address some of our most pressing health issues. IMHO

Why Is Eli Lilly's CEO on the Media Offensive?

If big Pharma would spend less on CNBC (and other) ads, and more on drug development and research, they would have more drugs in the pipeline coming to market, and the world would be a better place. I vote for going back to a previous world, where drug marketing was very much more restricted, and TV ads not allowed, and if such was adopted here in the US, I would look forward to a new world of drugs on the market with solutions to some of our most pressing disease problems. We don't have solutions to some of these most pressing disease problems, because drug companies are spending much more on drug marketing, than on research. There are times when one can watch 5 or 6 drug ads in a row on CNBC, and those ads are expensive.

IMHO

Big Pharma Pipeline: Why So Dry?

Please take a look at the ratio of drug company marketing spending, to research spending. I maintain that when they started spending more on advertising, than on research, the number of new drugs discovered, tanked. The last article I saw on this subject says that they are now spending in the neighborhood of 2-3 times as much on marketing, as on research. Perhaps, if they just did the research (and did it right), and forgot the advertising, they could produce a few more new drugs.

Then there is the use of questionable statistics in analyzing the data. The experts in the various medical fields cannot even agree that some of these new drugs are safe and effective for their intended uses. Given their recent record of producing drugs with so many questionable results, one has to wonder why they didn't discover that these drugs were not safe and effective until they were already on the market. Very poor science, it seems to me, and also very poor statistical analysis. And, I might add, very poor oversight by the regulators.

Some return to basic good science, is perhaps all that is needed. That, and a little less marketing.