There has to be learning in there about what went wrong and what didn’t – but all that is kept secret by the companies. We are writing a white paper to send to the Health and Social Care Committee, in which we are going to ask really searching questions, such as why is the industry allowed to test its own products – there is no other industry that does that – and why aren’t there post-mortems on failed clinical trials? Then the drug fails, thousands and thousands of patients have their hopes dashed. You can imagine the disappointment of patients and relatives of the patients when they think there is a trial that is going to help them. HR: High attrition rates of drugs is also an issue 95% of drug development ends in failure and 245 out of 250 pre-clinical candidates fail. Therefore, it looked as if blockbuster revenues came from having a patented drug and clever sales and marketing, and so the rest of the industry copied that approach.ĪN: How do high R&D costs and high failure rates in clinical trials feed into the pharma industry’s negative reputation? Glaxo used the same process as Smith Kline and French, but it made its product a little bit safer for patients, and successfully used sales and marketing so in a few years Zantac was outselling Tagemet by three to one. This switch originated with a battle between two anti-ulcer drugs in the early 1980s Smith Kline and French’s Tagemet and Glaxo’s Zantac. Over the last 40 years that vertical integration has transformed into horizontal integration through a process of outsourcing the expertise to bring drugs to market doesn’t lay with the big pharmaceutical companies anymore, they have to work with contractors to develop drugs. Companies were able to get patents for the process, not just the molecules. HR: We have to go back 40, 50 years to when the industry was vertically integrated – the large pharmaceutical companies owned the facilities for making drugs, they employed the people and they sourced from suppliers in a vertically integrated way. AN: When did this situation emerge and how has it consolidated itself?
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