HOW PHARMA COMPANIES LEARNED TO FLOG DRUGS

Find It, File It, Flog It

Two very self-satisfied scientists admiring their ‘Find’, dreaming of retiring to a life in the sun:

Excerpt from FIND IT, FILE IT, FLOG IT: Pharma’s Crippling Addiction and How to Cure It, Hedley Rees, Amazon CreateSpace, 2015 - see review by Amazon’s recommended book reviewer, Kirkus, here.

Rich pickings begin

Pickings began to get rich starting in the mid-1970s, mostly from the battle of the stomach ulcer drugs Tagamet (Smith Kline & French) and Zantac (Glaxo). Even though Tagamet was the first to market (1976), Zantac overtook Tagamet soon after its launch in 1981 with what was reported to be a superior marketing effort. This seems to have been the birth of the blockbuster era.

By the early 1980s, industry players learned that a patented compound—new molecular entity—with an important license to sell could use nimble marketing to make huge profits under the shelter of patent protection. The industry focused increasingly on patenting as many compounds as seemed reasonable, selected the…