so who is in charge of THIS fraud?

[Guest guest]

......and WHY are they allowed to SELL them at such imflated prices?

Why isn't this on the FRONT PAGE of every newspaper in the US?

J. Pedersen DC

Published on Monday, December 8, 2003 by the lndependent/UK

Glaxo Chief: Our Drugs Do

Not Work on Most Patients

by Steve Connor

A senior executive with Britain's biggest drugs company has

admitted

that most prescription medicines do not work on most people who take

them.

Roses, worldwide vice-president of genetics at

GlaxoKline

(GSK), said fewer than half of the patients prescribed some of the most

expensive drugs actually derived any benefit from them.

It is an open secret within the drugs industry that most of

its

products are ineffective in most patients but this is the first time

that such a senior drugs boss has gone public. His comments come days

after it emerged that the NHS drugs bill has soared by nearly 50 per

cent in three years, rising by £2.3bn a year to an annual cost to the

taxpayer of £7.2bn. GSK announced last week that it had 20 or more new

drugs under development that could each earn the company up to $1bn

(£600m) a year.

Also See:

Demolished:

The Myth That Allows Drugs Giants to Sell More

Dr Roses, an academic geneticist from Duke University

in North Carolina, spoke at a recent scientific meeting in London where

he cited figures on how well different classes of drugs work in real

patients.

Drugs for Alzheimer's disease work in fewer than one in three

patients, whereas those for cancer are only effective in a quarter of

patients. Drugs for migraines, for osteoporosis, and arthritis work in

about half the patients, Dr Roses said. Most drugs work in fewer than

one in two patients mainly because the recipients carry genes that

interfere in some way with the medicine, he said.

"The vast majority of drugs - more than 90 per cent - only

work in

30 or 50 per cent of the people," Dr Roses said. "I wouldn't say that

most drugs don't work. I would say that most drugs work in 30 to 50 per

cent of people. Drugs out there on the market work, but they don't work

in everybody."

Some industry analysts said Dr Roses's comments were

reminiscent of

the 1991 gaffe by Gerald Ratner, the jewelry boss, who famously said

that his high street shops are successful because they sold "total

crap". But others believe Dr Roses deserves credit for being honest

about a little-publicized fact known to the drugs industry for many

years.

"Roses is a smart guy and what he is saying will surprise the

public

but not his colleagues," said one industry scientist. "He is a pioneer

of a new culture within the drugs business based on using genes to test

for who can benefit from a particular drug."

Dr Roses has a formidable reputation in the field of

"pharmacogenomics" - the application of human genetics to drug

development - and his comments can be seen as an attempt to make the

industry realize that its future rests on being able to target drugs to

a smaller number of patients with specific genes.

The idea is to identify "responders" - people who benefit from

the

drug - with a simple and cheap genetic test that can be used to

eliminate those non-responders who might benefit from another drug.

This goes against a marketing culture within the industry that

has

relied on selling as many drugs as possible to the widest number of

patients - a culture that has made GSK one of the most profitable

pharmaceuticals companies, but which has also meant that most of its

drugs are at best useless, and even possibly dangerous, for many

patients.

Dr Roses said doctors treating patients routinely applied the

trial-and-error approach which says that if one drug does not work

there is always another one. "I think everybody has it in their

experience that multiple drugs have been used for their headache or

multiple drugs have been used for their backache or whatever.

"It's in their experience, but they don't quite understand

why. The

reason why is because they have different susceptibilities to the

effect of that drug and that's genetic," he said.

"Neither those who pay for medical care nor patients want

drugs to

be prescribed that do not benefit the recipient. Pharmacogenetics has

the promise of removing much of the uncertainty."

Response rates

Therapeutic area: drug efficacy rate in per cent

Alzheimer's: 30

Analgesics (-2): 80

Asthma: 60

Cardiac Arrhythmias: 60

Depression (SSRI): 62

Diabetes: 57

Hepatitis C (HCV): 47

Incontinence: 40

Migraine (acute): 52

Migraine (prophylaxis)50

Oncology: 25

Rheumatoid arthritis50

Schizophrenia: 60