Abbvie, currently gouging an eye watering $14 Billion a year from Humira has just bought a new biologic therapy which currently is in stage 2 trials for the treatment of Crohn's disease.
http://www.pharmalive.com/abbvie-co...ringer-ingelheims-psoriasis-and-crohns-drugs/
Why does this story bother me? Why is this story not attracting outrage as the actions of Martin Shkreli did only recently over HIV treatments?
Abbvie is a company that generates nearly $20 Billion in revenue every year (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AbbVie_Inc.). Nearly three quarters of that revenue comes from a single drug, Humira, the patent on which is about to expire. They need a new golden goose therefore, otherwise their huge revenue streams will collapse as a stream of bio-similar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosimilar) Humira drugs appear and patients who previously could not access this treatment due to cost can get it. This is good news, right? No.
Abbvie employs 28,000 smart, highly educated people. Yet not a single one of them has an incentive to cure Crohn's. Why would they want to do that when a 25 year patent on a biologic maintenance treatment could generate in the region of $300+ Billion over its lifetime?
Compare this with the actual funding available to research a cure into Crohn's. I have looked very, very hard and can tell you that the total available to fund a cure globally is less than $100 Million annually. Possibly, a lot less. Let's look at those number side by side:
Maintenance drugs (25 years): $300,000,000,000
Cure (25 years research): $ 2,500,000,000
Less than 1% of the money generated by keeping us sick, but alive, is spent spent on finding a cure. Doing so makes good business sense, it is capitalism in action, healthy people don't need expensive treatments.
Yet, morally and ethically this is outrageous. Surely, this needs to change and we, as the sufferers of this disease, need to be doing more about it.
http://www.pharmalive.com/abbvie-co...ringer-ingelheims-psoriasis-and-crohns-drugs/
Why does this story bother me? Why is this story not attracting outrage as the actions of Martin Shkreli did only recently over HIV treatments?
Abbvie is a company that generates nearly $20 Billion in revenue every year (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AbbVie_Inc.). Nearly three quarters of that revenue comes from a single drug, Humira, the patent on which is about to expire. They need a new golden goose therefore, otherwise their huge revenue streams will collapse as a stream of bio-similar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosimilar) Humira drugs appear and patients who previously could not access this treatment due to cost can get it. This is good news, right? No.
Abbvie employs 28,000 smart, highly educated people. Yet not a single one of them has an incentive to cure Crohn's. Why would they want to do that when a 25 year patent on a biologic maintenance treatment could generate in the region of $300+ Billion over its lifetime?
Compare this with the actual funding available to research a cure into Crohn's. I have looked very, very hard and can tell you that the total available to fund a cure globally is less than $100 Million annually. Possibly, a lot less. Let's look at those number side by side:
Maintenance drugs (25 years): $300,000,000,000
Cure (25 years research): $ 2,500,000,000
Less than 1% of the money generated by keeping us sick, but alive, is spent spent on finding a cure. Doing so makes good business sense, it is capitalism in action, healthy people don't need expensive treatments.
Yet, morally and ethically this is outrageous. Surely, this needs to change and we, as the sufferers of this disease, need to be doing more about it.