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posted by cmn32480 on Friday August 12 2016, @06:01AM   Printer-friendly
from the pointed-commentary dept.

Dr. Lowe (of Things I Won't Work With" fame) has a blog, In The Pipeline, to which he recently posted an interesting commentary on the topic of direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical marketing:

There's an op-ed in The New York Times that makes tough reading, and it's something that we're going to be seeing more of. The author, Matt Jablow, lost his wife Ronna to non-small cell lung cancer, undiagnosed until a late stage, which is bad enough.

[...] And now, as Jablow says, he gets to watch commercials for Opdivo talking about how it can extend lives, ask your doctor, and so on, and he's (understandably) not happy about it. I'd find it painful, too – who wouldn't?

[...] The op-ed goes on to note the recent failed trial as dashing "the highest of hopes", but those were the highest of hopes for people who haven't been following the biology closely (which includes many investors as well).

[...] Immuno-oncology, in its various forms, has pulled some people practically out of the grave by current treatment standards, and we're going to see more of that in the years to come. But we're also going to see people who aren't helped by it, not yet, and losing them will be harder than ever.

Much more money is spent on pharmaceutical marketing than on research and about 12.5% of the marketing budget is devoted to direct to consumer advertising. Except for the US and New Zealand, the rest of the world does not allow direct to consumer advertising of prescription drugs.

Some US companies, such as Insys Therapeutics, also pay doctors through "speaker programs" and employ former exotic dancers as sales representatives.

http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/08/09/a-painful-cancer-advertisement
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/opinion/cancer-drug-ads-vs-cancer-drug-reality.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmaceutical_marketing
http://sirf-online.org/2015/04/24/the-new-killing-it/


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by anubi on Friday August 12 2016, @10:18AM

    by anubi (2828) on Friday August 12 2016, @10:18AM (#386957) Journal

    ... that of the physician as a compensated endorser. ...

    I was contacted about five years ago by an inventor and investment advisor about a novel way of doing data transmission. They were very interested that I indeed *did* have a University degree as an electronics engineer and that I could verify my employment with a major aerospace firm.

    I took one look at the invention, and it was quite obvious to me it would never work as claimed.

    However, several million dollars of other people's money was at stake here, as they needed someone to root for this.

    I refused and backed out, claiming that in all honesty, there was no way I could possibly see this thing could ever work, and could not vouch for it.

    Hell, I had just got laid off from that aerospace company and could have really used the money.

    Well, that did not stop them. They went on making up all sorts of fancy sales brochures and holding meetings with nontechnical investors, all with a gleam in their eye for the humongous returns the well-dressed counselors were throwing around. Everybody running around with the green eyes of greed. I had signed an NDA with them in order to have the invention revealed to me, and I was now bound by what I had agreed to not to testify to my feelings on the matter.

    About two years later, they finally completed the patent papers, had acquired lots of funding from quite a few investors, the organizers of this whole charade were paid nicely - at the top being the patent attorney... who got enough money to buy himself yet another rental income property free and clear. All the rest got their sales commissions. The inventor got NOTHING. It didn't work, and the way the contract with him was worded, he got a hefty percentage of the sales price, and when the patent was finally offered to "the major corporations" when "sufficient patent protection was in place", the big companies saw the same thing I saw.

    The inventor was furious and told me what was going on. I believe he was simply delusional to the underlying physics... something the business promoter saw and took advantage of. He was mad at me because he seemed to be of the belief I could make his plan work. But the physics just was not there for it to work that way.

    I tried to keep him out of this mess, but he was determined to see this out. The "businessmen" he was working with spent a grand total of maybe twenty thousand dollars renting him an industrial building and buying him some stuff to make models. And that was what they wanted me for.... make models of this thing ... and give them "backed by a rocket engineer!" to their sales spiels.

    I, too, was asked to contribute my name and work until the thing sold - at which point I was to get 20% of the proceeds. If anything I felt I would have been due about 50% of the high velocity airborne lead that was sure to be flying when the truth eventually emerged.

    I estimate they got about 100 to 1 return on their investment... all from other investors ... who got nothing for their investment but binders full of documents describing the presentation of the invention to industry giants.

    I have already had that done to me once, as a Real Estate Investment Trust... where a bunch of guys of the Suit and Tie gather together and cook up a plan to persuade others to invest their retirement savings, and now I was invited to the same damned thing again - this time with a technical twist. The Suit, the Tie, the Plastic Smile, the Outstreched Hand. Someone's fixing to get their goose cooked!

    --
    "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
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