US drug company marketing costs 2x their R&D

[Darth Wong]

Yup, after all these years of hearing how much money US pharmaceutical companies spend on R&D, it turns out they only spend half as much on R&D as they do on marketing.

http://www.cbc.ca/consumer/story/2008/01/03/drugs.html

Gotta love that superior free-market health-care system.

[Flagg]

Yup, after all these years of hearing how much money US pharmaceutical companies spend on R&D, it turns out they only spend half as much on R&D as they do on marketing.

http://www.cbc.ca/consumer/story/2008/01/03/drugs.html

Gotta love that superior free-market health-care system.

Was there really any doubt? With all the office supplies and free lunches provided by drug reps to health clinics? With all the TV, radio, internet, and print ads?

The fact that the only major advancements that seem to be made are for giving you a boner or curing made up bullshit like Restless Leg Syndrome? Is anyone really surprised that they are spending moutains on advertisement and dick on R&D?

And with the R&D shit, how much is being spent for treatments and cures for serious diseases like diabetes, cancer, and AIDS as opposed to money-making producrts like the aforementioned boner juice?

"Ask your doctor!"? What fucking planet are we on that a patient is encouraged to ask their doctor for a specific medication when the cause for their symptoms may be something else?

Mike, do they allow RX advertisements on Canadian TV? I get CBC here and watch it for a few things, but I can't recall whether I've seen any or not.

Yes, I know "RLS" is real, and I know a few people who have it, but do we need 3 ads about it an hour?

[Natorgator]

So what? Given the fact drugs can take two decades to come to market and make the companies any money whatsoever (if they do at all, the FDA can blacklist something at any time), them promoting what they've already spent billions of dollars on isn't that surprising.

[CmdrWilkens]

So what? Given the fact drugs can take two decades to come to market and make the companies any money whatsoever (if they do at all, the FDA can blacklist something at any time), them promoting what they've already spent billions of dollars on isn't that surprising.

All of which is much more indicative of a basically poor pharmaceutical development economics in the US. The point is they are spending both R&D as well as HUGE advertising dollars on medicines which do not affect life threatening or debilitating diseases. They are all about "quality of life" drugs which is shorthand for long lasting boners and less butt gas. Honestly we would be infinitely better off were we to have a national health plan which has the buying power to render such bullshit medication useless and refocus drug companies at developing cures for real diseases that the national health system would then buy (and buy in huge quantities). If we worked more along the lines of freaking defense contracting we would be better even which is really sad.

[brianeyci]

So what?

It's a big deal because a doctor should be the one who decides what medicines a person takes, not a patient who sees a commercial on television. It's also a big deal because big pharmacy makes it a big deal. They say that if states buy bulk generic drugs, there won't be enough money for research and development. Well, I could care less if there's less research on boner drugs, but they make it seem as if it would hurt the cure for AIDS.

You could say that advertising just makes people aware of the drug and doesn't promote the drug, but that's a very fine line and the mechanisms by which advertising increase sales is well documented. And it has nothing to do with giving consumers a proper choice and everything to do with repeating the same word over and over so the lowest common denominator who can't make an informed choice make the lazy choice and pick the one they have heard the most.

[Broomstick]

And with the R&D shit, how much is being spent for treatments and cures for serious diseases like diabetes, cancer, and AIDS as opposed to money-making producrts like the aforementioned boner juice?

To be fair - viagra was originally developed for heart disease, the erections were an unanticipated side effect. I can't really fault the company for exploiting such an accidental find.

Some of the OTHER bullshit - yeah, it's bullshit.

On the bright side - in a convoluted way:

As mentioned in my sig, I am currently without health insurance, but my husband needs daily medication. Fortunately, 4 of the 5 meds are cheap generics and total to less than $85/month, which we can actually pay out of pocket without undue hardship. The fifth one... $150/month. Ouch.

Explained the situation to the doctor, who was quite understanding. It seems he's always soaking the pharmaceutical reps for free samples. Today I stopped by his office, he handed me a bag with 3 months worth of free samples of said pricey med, and said if I still didn't have a job and insurance when those ran out to come back.

Which is good for us - but that's a fucking ass-backwards way to run healthcare. But at least a sliver of the marketing materials are going to actual healthcare in our case.

[Stark]

Doesn't the article also suggest that they're spending MORE overall on marketing than R&D, so either they're spending billions on marketing as well as R&D or the 'billions' it costs to put a new drug on the market includes a serious slice of cash for marketing?

The thrust that the drug industry competing in the minds of consumers instead of putting that money into actual health-focused research isn't affected either way. A Brian says, your doctor needs to know about drugs, not you: patients shouldn't be 'consumers' of branded drugs.

[Patrick Degan]

That's just commie lies being spread by the People's Republic of Soviet Canuckistan. American Health Care is TEH UBERZ.

PAY NO ATTENTION TO THAT PHARMA REP BEHIND THE CURTAIN. THE GREAT OZ HAS SPOKEN.

[Natorgator]

Explained the situation to the doctor, who was quite understanding. It seems he's always soaking the pharmaceutical reps for free samples. Today I stopped by his office, he handed me a bag with 3 months worth of free samples of said pricey med, and said if I still didn't have a job and insurance when those ran out to come back.

Which is good for us - but that's a fucking ass-backwards way to run healthcare. But at least a sliver of the marketing materials are going to actual healthcare in our case.

You can actually get free samples of most drugs from a lot of places. They just don't really advertise that.

[Broomstick]

Of course they don't advertise it! Except, of course, to say they have "programs" for the poor.

[Darth Wong]

So what? Given the fact drugs can take two decades to come to market and make the companies any money whatsoever (if they do at all, the FDA can blacklist something at any time), them promoting what they've already spent billions of dollars on isn't that surprising.

Obviously, you've been sleeping through the last decade of health-care debates, where the big pharmaceutical companies claimed that exorbitant drug costs were the inevitable result of sky-high R&D spending. The POINT which you are apparently too fucking dense to grasp is that this was all a lie. For every dollar they were spending on R&D, they were spending two dollars on marketing, and telling everyone that their exorbitant drug costs were paying for future research.

[Spyder]

So what? Given the fact drugs can take two decades to come to market and make the companies any money whatsoever (if they do at all, the FDA can blacklist something at any time), them promoting what they've already spent billions of dollars on isn't that surprising.

These aren't cars here we're talking about. There's no reason prescription drugs need to be marketed at all . The results from the clinical trials make it into medical journals and doctors prescribe as appropriate. None of this "do you wake up feeling tired in the mornings? Ask you doctor if x is right for you!" bullshit.

[neoolong]

Of course they don't advertise it! Except, of course, to say they have "programs" for the poor.

Ironically, a study found that the free drugs tended to go to the rich and insured. In fact, they were found to be a marketing tool.

Link.

[Alan Bolte]

I must admit, that fact that any of you didn't already know this is a bit strange to me. It's not exactly a secret, unless your sole source of information is drug industry press releases.

[Darth Wong]

I must admit, that fact that any of you didn't already know this is a bit strange to me. It's not exactly a secret, unless your sole source of information is drug industry press releases.

The 2x figure was a surprise to me.

[Alan Bolte]

Come to think of it, you're right, I knew it was larger, but not by quite how much.

[Stark]

I personally had no idea that it was more. I knew they spent shitloads on marketing, but I assumed it was less than the claimed huge sums spent on R&D. As Mike says, this has been the explanation for expensive drugs, and it turns out they could chop the cost of these drugs in half just by ditching much of the marketing.

[Durandal]

I'd heard estimates that their marketing budget was larger by a factor of 3 in the past, but this is still plenty obscene. The worst part is that those costs are are covered by the time their billion-dollar profits are assessed. They're clearly making more than enough money to sustain their operations, yet for some idiotic reason, American citizens have to pay sky-high drug prices.

The simple reality is that these companies measure their profits in the billions. All the spin-doctoring in the world won't change that. They can clearly afford to charge less for their drugs.

[mr friendly guy]

Was there really any doubt? With all the office supplies and free lunches provided by drug reps to health clinics? With all the TV, radio, internet, and print ads?

I figured it would be high, but most probably not this high. I am interested to see how figures vary between country. Over here for example, drug companies are limited in what they can give doctors. Although they make pretty good free pens.

The fact that the only major advancements that seem to be made are for giving you a boner or curing made up bullshit like Restless Leg Syndrome? Is anyone really surprised that they are spending moutains on advertisement and dick on R&D?

And with the R&D shit, how much is being spent for treatments and cures for serious diseases like diabetes, cancer, and AIDS as opposed to money-making producrts like the aforementioned boner juice?

While I agree with you that this figure is distasteful, your claim that the only MAJOR advancement being in restless leg syndrome or "made up bullshit stuff" is simply wrong. To use your examples of serious diseases

AIDS
co-receptor inhibitors, integrase inhibitors (these were only approved for use in 2007, but thats from wiki). However I can tell you that when I was a student less than a decade ago we mainly had reverse transcriptase inhibitors and some protease inhibitors.

Cancer
Tyrosine kinase inhibitors - eg imatinib, before this drug we had virtually no way of treating GIST cancers which were notoriously resistant to chemotherapy.

VEGF inhibitors - works by cutting off the tumours blood supply

EGFR- inhibitors - eg cetuximab for colorectal, head and neck cancers.

Trastuzumab (herceptin) - against specific subtype of breast cancer which has traditionally been resistant to previous treatment

diabetes
Thiazolidinediones - came out in the late 90s

Also the name eludes me for the moment, but 2 new drugs will be coming out on the Australian market which works by different mechanism. One of them I remember vaguely as being derived from the poison of some American lizard.

Also there have been advancements in the treatment of immune mediated diseases like Inflammatory bowel disease, rheumatoid arthritis etc with the advent of monoclonal antibodies.

"Ask your doctor!"? What fucking planet are we on that a patient is encouraged to ask their doctor for a specific medication when the cause for their symptoms may be something else?

That is just so goddamn stupid. If you have a medical condition just see a doctor period, and let them work out what medication you need.

Yes, I know "RLS" is real, and I know a few people who have it, but do we need 3 ads about it an hour?

Good God. I bet you most people over here wouldn't have heard of it. Its only something I read about because it was an answer in an MCQ. I have never seen it in practice except in a video recording.

[The Kernel]

This isn't a surprise, I brought this up 4 years ago when I was perusing Pfizer's P&L sheet. R&D costs at big pharma are considerable, but they are nothing compared to the ratios of your average silicon valley tech company.

[Admiral Valdemar]

The US sucks for a lot of things, one of them is how Big Pharma there follows US politics in the whole spending cash of insane amounts to make a point (although a breakdown of spending does give a better picture).

But I want to reiterate mr friendly guy's point. Just today, my company's internal market news had such items as:

• - Novartis' Bazedoxifene: a prevention of post-menopause osteoporosis.
  
  - Merck's new anti-schizophrenia compound getting the green light by the FDA.
  
  - Pfizer's Dalbavancin, a lipoglycopeptide antibiotic that is in final Phase III trials and will certainly be needed in this superbug age.
  
  - Accentia's BiovaxID, a Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma vaccine with remarkable results.
  
  - DOR BioPharma, Inc. getting the go ahead for a pædiatric Crohn's disease treatment.
  
  - NicOx and Pfizer's experimental compound PF-03187207 for glaucoma has passed Phase II proof-of-concept studies.
  
  - Genzyme's Aldurazyme for targeting mucopolysaccharidosis I (MPS I: an inherited disease causing lack of alpha-L-iduronidase leading to malfunctioning lysosomal enzymes for lysing glycosaminoglycans and related complex carbohydrates) gets a boost in funding with a joint venture with another company.

That's one day of news. I could list the studies I've personally overseen in the last month from a new chemoembolisation delivery mechanism for Irinotecan fighting bowel cancer, to Troponin I assay validation techniques through to monoclonal antibody therapies using the MIP-1α chemokine ELISA. But hey, let's all simply remember that a drug that actually has other vasodilation uses made Pfizer, Inc. billions because it gave rich, white middle-aged men boners for longer. After all, it's not like we can make drugs that help people with such things as well.

I also expect, as should be the case in the US as it is here, that this marketing expense is for the industry. When did you last see someone advertising a chemotherapy on prime-time TV for you and urging you to go and buy it? The vast majority of these costs go into educating GPs, sales representatives having lunches and delivering presentations in order to win a contract with a hospital or health authority. It is most certainly not all based on advertising for the average Joe, because amazingly, the average Joe would know jack and shit about what any of these marketers say means. I was nearly one such Big Pharma marketer, and you need at the minimum a degree in biology, preferably pharmaceutical sciences though, and an ability to pitch a sale well and know what the heck the drug is you're selling. Because if you can't convince a physician he needs this drug, then why should you go to some guy on the street? "Oh hey, you've got Lemsip for colds, right? Allow me to sell you a year's supply of Matulane, just in case you get the big C one day". It doesn't work that way.

There are also considerable costs for training up such healthcare professionals in these drug treatments or methodologies too, which is lumped under the "marketing" moniker along with the free lunches and professional scientists-cum-salesmen.

Yes, they could probably trim fat and pump more into truly necessary drugs, but here's the thing. They're not a charity. They're not obliged to give you drugs for free, or even for cheap. If you had any idea of just how difficult it is to make these things and how hard it can be to turn a profit, regardless of the "ZOMG!1! GLAXO CEOs HAD A TOGA PARTY AND ALL DRIVE BENTLEYs!!1", then you'd see why they need to expend so much in trying to sell the drugs they've actually got ready for market. And that's if the drug is safe and the market doesn't have a better alternative. Plenty of compounds are only found to be dangerous or have worse side-effects than anticipated once in Phase IV, which is basically on sale at a hospital near you.

The bigger gripe here is THE US HEALTHCARE SYSTEM FUCKING SUCKS. I'd be much more pissed at that than shooting at the drugs companies, because France sure as hell has no issues in getting quality treatment to her patients, and even the NHS here does a damn sight better than the States. The US is Third World for healthcare, and it'd be a massive joke if people weren't dying or living with horrible quality of life.

That said, the US was the one nation that systematically both pioneered shitty science and the guidelines everyone now uses to avoid shitty science (read up on the likes of Searle and Hazelton. They had studies with mice where bio-security was so lax, feral mice came in to breed with the lab mice, the technicians couldn't tell whether a mouse was dead or alive or simply replaced one given records showed an animal would be dead one day, then alive the next and the whole lab flooded and was never noted down). So I guess, if anything, the US is just a cesspit for business that you don't see elsewhere. I certainly don't see excessive marketing to the public here, unless it's flu season and then GSK goes nuts.

Course, I do hope the current situation regarding economics today involves the death throes of capitalism as it currently stands and a new, better system, whatever that may be, rising from the ashes. One that doesn't have the US kow towing the lobby everything method, which has long infected politics.

[mr friendly guy]

I am interested to see how much it costs to advertise on US television, vs how much it costs to advertise to doctors in the form of free lunches, cheap pens, note pads etc. These days drug companies can't give us free plane trips to exotic locations to attend "conferences" anymore. The most they give us is free medical books, useful stuff like cheap pens and note pads, "stick its" etc.

Yeah and I also have the seretide (asthma med) dragon and hand puppet, and the symbicort (another asthma med) penguin.

I should also throw my hat in to those bagging viagra, by also pointing out that it now is used to treat other more serious conditions than not being able to get an erection - namely pulmonary hypertension.

[Darth Wong]

People who don't live in or near the US might not appreciate how inescapable those pharmaceutical ads are. The TV is literally inundated with them. There are large billboards all over the place. You can't escape it, and that's got to cost a lot of money.

[muse]

People who don't live in or near the US might not appreciate how inescapable those pharmaceutical ads are. The TV is literally inundated with them. There are large billboards all over the place. You can't escape it, and that's got to cost a lot of money.

I was watching football with my BF this past weekend and there were literally more ads for various prescription drugs than there were for beer.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Everything's bigger in the US. I can only assume the ire against Big Pharma there is justified by a marketing phenomenon that is totally absent from the likes of Europe. I do know that lobbying by any major corporation is a big thing there, so it doesn't surprise me that they'd go a step further and brainwash the public too.

Still, it may just be hyperbole in the end. It can't be that bad.

Let's see...

...

Actually, forget everything I said. This proves Satan exists. And he has stock in Big Pharma.