This might be one of the most ridiculous government schemes EVER!
Stuck in a funk
Major drug companies are in a funk. They’re losing their ability to stuff executives’ pockets with your hard-earned cash.
The problem: Their blockbuster drugs are going bye-bye.
The Big Kahuna — the biggest selling drug of all time — Lipitor is about to head off into the sunset when Pfizer’s patent runs out in five months.
Lipitor generates about $10 billion in sales each year.
Bye-bye!
Coincidentally, patent loss of other major products happens to be hitting several companies this year — including GlaxoSmithKline and Bayer.
The solution? New blockbusters, of course!
Yeah — one little problem: The drug industry has hit a major dry spell and no new blockbusters are in the pipeline.
Don’t worry, though. The National Institutes of Health has a plan.
And it’s a perfect way to get rid of $1 billion of our money.
His own private Idaho
NIH has developed a new institution called National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS).
Out here in the non-government, non-hogwash world, here’s what the accurate name of the new center would be: National Center for Developing New Drugs for the Drug Industry.
That’s right — your government is going to devote $1 billion MINIMUM in a half-baked attempt to do the drug industry’s work.
Drug giants invested around $45 billion in new drug research in 2009. But that year, as with other recent years, the results were underwhelming. And yet, those cockeyed optimists at NIH hope to invest a very small fraction of that and do a better job than the people who live and breathe this stuff (and the profits from it) every day.
According to a New York Times article, NIH officials acknowledge that they might not succeed where private industry has failed, “but they say doing nothing is not an option.”
Okay, first off, doing nothing IS an option — but more to the point, it’s just the right thing to do. Haven’t we bailed out enough industries so far?
And secondly, the yearly industry investment of $45 billion doesn’t quite qualify as “doing nothing.”
Obviously, NIH officials can’t be missing these glaring realities. So what’s REALLY going on here?
My hunch: It’s a vanity project.
The Times notes that NCATS is a “signature effort” Dr. Francis S. Collins, the director of NIH. Dr. Collins directed the NIH Human Genome Project, and he’s one of many (me included) who believe that genetics will probably dominate the world of health care in the 21st century.
The difference between me and Dr. Collins is that he’s specifically focused on the idea of developing new drugs based on genetic research — presumably research that he’s played a large role in creating.
But his vision is stalled on the launch pad.
Drug makers have already invested “tens of billions of dollars” to develop drugs from gene-related research. TENS OF BILLIONS! Adding up to a big goose egg. And yet Dr. Collins believes his team can turn all that around with a single billion.
And here’s why they won’t…
Dr. Collins is looking at the future of medicine. But drug companies are looking at the future of Big Pharma. HUGE difference! And that difference is bottom line profits.
Sources:
“Pfizer faces losses as Lipitor patent set to expire” CBS News, 3/10/11, cbsnews.com
“Federal Research Center Will Help Develop Medicines” Gardiner Harris, New York Times, 1/22/11, nytimes.com
“What Innovation? NIH Moves into Drug Development” Ed Silverman, Pharmalot, 1/24/11, pharmalot.com
