A focus on diseases for which it believes it can develop more valuable drugs
Feb/04/2010 04:03 Filed in: Business of
health #in
There is no
doubt that developing new drugs is costlier and
harder than ever before. There is a huge
financial risk in developing drugs aimed at
depression. Clinical trials of antidepressants
are among the "most expensive and highest-risk"
of all drug trials, Mr. Witty said, because
companies often don't know until the end of very
large studies whether a drug works. It is also
hard to prove that a depression drug is working,
he said, because patient improvement is measured
by subjective mood surveys, and not by the
clear-cut blood tests and biological measures
used in other diseases.
I don't know about your but what I read is that coupled with the cut in R&D spending GSK has determined that it's not worth the ROI to try and develop new drugs for depression and thus patients who are diagnosed with depression are going to have to rely on drugs on the market or drugs in development from competitors.
Mildly depressed Americans have spent billions of dollars over the past few decades hoping to relieve their blues by taking designer antidepressants. They might have done just as well by taking a placebo. That's the surprising implication of a study by psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania, Vanderbilt University, the University of New Mexico and the University of Colorado. Many industry-sponsored studies have excluded patients with mild depression, even though these patients often end up in doctors' offices looking for help.
It found that antidepressants drugs were virtually no better than a placebo for people with mild or moderate depression. Only in people with very severe depression did the antidepressant effect become substantially greater than that produced by a dummy pill. It is unknown exactly how many patients taking antidepressants have milder cases of depression. But one survey cited by the researchers found that 71% of all patients seeking treatment for depression fall in the milder category, where placebos are likely to do as well.
The Penn-led study only looked at two drugs, Paxil from GlaxoSmithKline and a well-known older drug called imipramine. But it follows on the heels of a larger 2008 study from University of Hull psychologist Irving Kirsch that compared 35 trials of four different antidepressant medications, including Prozac from Eli Lilly, Effexor from Pfizer and Paxil. The study, published in PLoS Medicine, also found "virtually no difference" between drugs and placebos for the moderately depressed, and only a relatively small difference even in the very severely depressed. "It seems to be the same pattern no matter which antidepressant you look at," says Kirsch. "Most of the benefits patients get from antidepressants may be the placebo effect."
Yet a study shows the use of antidepressant medication has Increased in past decade. It appears that the percentage of people in America who receive antidepressant medication climbed from just under 6% (5.4%) in the mid-1990’s, to just over 10% in this decade. How much of this was due to aggressive marketing from the drug industry?
So is GSK making this decision because now they need HARD evidence that new medications for depression actually work or are they making this decision because the marketing of depression medications is getting harder? Either way once again the losers in all this are patients who suffer from depression and are looking to the drug industry for new drugs to help them deal with this problem.
I don't know about your but what I read is that coupled with the cut in R&D spending GSK has determined that it's not worth the ROI to try and develop new drugs for depression and thus patients who are diagnosed with depression are going to have to rely on drugs on the market or drugs in development from competitors.
Mildly depressed Americans have spent billions of dollars over the past few decades hoping to relieve their blues by taking designer antidepressants. They might have done just as well by taking a placebo. That's the surprising implication of a study by psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania, Vanderbilt University, the University of New Mexico and the University of Colorado. Many industry-sponsored studies have excluded patients with mild depression, even though these patients often end up in doctors' offices looking for help.
It found that antidepressants drugs were virtually no better than a placebo for people with mild or moderate depression. Only in people with very severe depression did the antidepressant effect become substantially greater than that produced by a dummy pill. It is unknown exactly how many patients taking antidepressants have milder cases of depression. But one survey cited by the researchers found that 71% of all patients seeking treatment for depression fall in the milder category, where placebos are likely to do as well.
The Penn-led study only looked at two drugs, Paxil from GlaxoSmithKline and a well-known older drug called imipramine. But it follows on the heels of a larger 2008 study from University of Hull psychologist Irving Kirsch that compared 35 trials of four different antidepressant medications, including Prozac from Eli Lilly, Effexor from Pfizer and Paxil. The study, published in PLoS Medicine, also found "virtually no difference" between drugs and placebos for the moderately depressed, and only a relatively small difference even in the very severely depressed. "It seems to be the same pattern no matter which antidepressant you look at," says Kirsch. "Most of the benefits patients get from antidepressants may be the placebo effect."
Yet a study shows the use of antidepressant medication has Increased in past decade. It appears that the percentage of people in America who receive antidepressant medication climbed from just under 6% (5.4%) in the mid-1990’s, to just over 10% in this decade. How much of this was due to aggressive marketing from the drug industry?
So is GSK making this decision because now they need HARD evidence that new medications for depression actually work or are they making this decision because the marketing of depression medications is getting harder? Either way once again the losers in all this are patients who suffer from depression and are looking to the drug industry for new drugs to help them deal with this problem.
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