But What Have They Done Lately?
Wall Street Journal
Letter
July 7, 2008; Page A12
Benjamin Zycher’s “Drug Development Needs Private Industry” (op-ed, June 28) aims to refute my statement, which he accurately quotes, “The drug companies do almost no innovation now [italics added].” But the examples of innovation he cites date back to the 1980s or earlier. Moreover, he doesn’t tell the whole story even about these older drugs. For example, Amgen did not work out the synthesis of Epogen on its own; it licensed the basic technique from Columbia University. Nearly every top-selling drug today has progenitors dating back many years, often based on NIH-funded research in universities.
Even Mr. Zycher found that of the 35 drugs he reviewed, “private-sector research was responsible for central advances in basic science for seven.” That’s not much of a yield. (Mr. Zycher should have mentioned that the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development, with which he collaborated, is largely supported by the pharmaceutical industry.) Far from doing scientific innovation, the large drug companies license or otherwise acquire discoveries from universities or small biotech companies, then develop them for commercial production and sponsor the clinical research necessary for FDA approval. That’s expensive, but hardly creative in the scientific sense. As one senior executive told Journal reporter Gautam Naik (Feb. 13, 2002), “We’re not going to put our money in-house if there’s a better investment vehicle outside.”
The problem with this sequence — publicly-funded innovation handed off to the drug companies — is that the industry expects to be rewarded as though it were the source of innovation, pricing drugs as high as the traffic will bear and doing everything possible to extend its exclusive marketing rights. The only really innovative thing about this industry today is the claims of its apologists.
Marcia Angell, M.D.
Harvard Medical School
Cambridge, Mass.