Derek Lowe's commentary on drug discovery and the pharma industry. An editorially independent blog from the publishers of Science Translational Medicine. All content is Derek’s own, and he does not in any way speak for his employer.
Unfortunately, we have another example of “price of ancient generic drug shoots through roof”. Whenever this happens, the first thing to look at is the regulatory environment. After that you can go on about the greed of the company and its executives, the stupidity of the insurance companies, all the usual stuff, and you won’t… Read More
There have been a few developments in the Turing Pharmaceuticals affair. Martin Shkreli, after given several fantastically annoying interviews, finally reversed course and said that the company will lower the price of Daraprim (pyrimethamine). He is not, at the moment, saying what the price will be lowered to: perhaps to merely ten times the previo… Read More
Martin Shkreli may finally have overstepped, and it will be a good thing if he has. Let me back up both those statements. Shkreli, you may recall, was the founder of Retrophin, a company whose business model was to buy up obscure orphan generic drugs (such as Thiola) and immediately raise their price by, say… Read More
The potential off-label use of Avastin for wet age-related macular degeneration has been a source of many arguments over the last few years. The arguments come because another formulation of the same drug, Lucentis, is what’s actually approved for wet AMD, and it’s significantly more expensive. (The two forms appear to have basically th… Read More
Well, it was not a dull evening around the In the Pipeline headquarters last night. I submitted a link to Reddit for my post yesterday about Retrophin and Thiola, and that blew up onto that site’s front page. The Corante server melted under the impact, which isn’t too surprising, since it’s struggling at the best… Read More
There’s a drug called Thiola (tiopronin) that most people have never heard of. It’s on my list of “smaller than aspirin” drugs, and I’d never heard of it until I put that one together. But thanks to a little company called Retrophin, we all get to hear about it now. It’s used to treat cystinuria… Read More
There’s a post by Peter Bach, of the Center for Health Policy and Outcomes, that’s been getting a lot of attention the last few days. It’s called “Unpronounceable Drugs, Incomprehensible Prices”, and you know what it says. No, really, you do, even if you haven’t seen it. Too high, unconscionable, market can’… Read More
What a mess there is in the hepatitis C world. Gilead is, famously, dominating the market with Sovaldi, whose price has set off all sorts of cost/benefit debates. The companies competing with them are scrambling to claim positions, and the Wall Street Journal says that AbbVie is really pulling out all the stops. Try this… Read More
I’ve been meaning to cover this controversy about Tamiflu (oseltamivir). The Cochrane group has reviewed all the clinical data obtainable on the drug’s efficacy, and has concluded that it doesn’t have much. That’s in contrast to an earlier review they’d conducted in 2008, which said that, overall, the evidence was slig… Read More
Here’s Ian Read of Pfizer, on that company’s reputation (and that of pharma in general): . . .many people — including not only regulators but also legislators and their constituents — have a say in how we can conduct our business. At the same time, many have a great and sometimes emotionally charged interest in… Read More
