jueves, 30 de noviembre de 2017

I+D: Knock Six Years off Timeline...



There’s only one honest answer to the question “How long does it take to develop a new drug?”, and that’s “Too @#$! long”. 
In the same way, the only honest answer to “What are the average chances for a drug candidate’s success?” is “Too @#$! low”. 
The combination of those two factors is the root of pretty much all the drug industry’s problems – everything else would get a lot easier to deal with if we could ease up on those two a bit.

Ver:

FARMAINDUSTRIA vende...imagen.


That being the case, there are plenty of people out there who are ready to tell you that they can do something about it. They fall all along the sliding scales of realistic/delusional, well-meaning/predatory, etc. What none of them have been able to do, so far, is make much of a dent in either of those big questions. Improvements do come along, but get balanced out by complications somewhere else, which is why the industry has been spending more and more over the years to maintain roughly similar levels of drug productivity. But this means that whatever new technology comes along, particularly if it’s not that well understood, can get wedged into a PowerPoint deck and sold to people who are hoping that the Next Big Thing has finally arrived.

Artificial Intelligence, in its various forms, is currently the hottest plateful of fried dough being served. It covers a lot of ground, has a lot of potential, and no one in the audience is likely to really understand the details: perfect. I follow this field with great interest, and despite skepticism, I’m not betting against it. That said, I have a limit, which has been reached by a slide deck produced by a consulting company, sent by a longtime reader of the blog. For instance, one of the slides says: 


The drug discovery process 
typically involves the identification 
of hundreds of compounds 
and their subsequent elimination 
in further rounds of testing. 

AI has the potential to help pharma companies discover drugs faster and more cheaply by narrowing the list of therapeutic targets.

OK, those are two different things. You have hundreds of compounds against a target you know about; narrowing the list of therapeutic targets is what you do before you make all those. That’s followed up by one of those big funnel-looking things, showing how projects narrow down to one approved drug. It’s got your Phase III, Phase II, Phase I, Pre-clinical. . .and before that, it has a big honking block of space labeled “Drug Discovery: thousands of molecules screened. 3-6 years”. Next up is the same funnel after the laying on of hands – that massive hunk at the beginning is now a tiny sliver, because “automatic drug discovery” has reduced that screening phase to “3-6 days”, shaving six years off your timelines.

Hooey. Screening “thousands of compounds” does not take you six years, believe me. You can do a million in six weeks. The whole compound screening step is just another early thing in preclinical space; I’ve never seen a successful project in which it was a rate-limiting step. But “shave a few weeks off something at the very beginning” isn’t as compelling an offer, is it? Looking at the companies they’re touting, I note that one of them is Atomwise, whose tendencies towards overstatement I’ve written about here and here. Others (new to me) are BenevolentAI and twoXAR. I will be very happy to see how these folks make out; I really don’t want to give the impression that I want them to fail. I mean, I do this for a living, too, and I would very much like to be able to do it better. We need some help over here! But we do not need some more hype over here – that’s my point.


Now, I should mention that I know people who are up to their collarbones in computational chemistry, in several places around the industry. And I’m told, by some of them, that there are methods that show real promise in advancing drug discovery, which will certainly be good news if true. But I’m also told by everyone involved that at the moment these methods are extremely computationally intensive, even with the best equipment available, so you’re not going to run a virtual screening effort with X-kazillion random compound this way. Not yet. A fully operational quantum computing platform would presumably come in handy, once a great big coding team has written modeling software to take advantage of it. But neither that hardware nor that software exist yet.

Rather than calculating from the ground up, I think that the Benevolent AI people are, like many others before them, mining the list of existing drugs looking for repurposing, and digging through the published literature looking for connections that may have escaped earlier observers. I feel sure that there must be quite a few of those, and I’d have to think that AI/machine learning/deep learning/whathaveyou is going to be a good way to find them. But that’s no easy task, either, considering that (at a guess) about 30% of the medical literature is useless or worse. Humans are needed to curate the data set that you’re feeding your software, and that’s a labor-intensive step. It’s still easier than what the Atomwises of the world are trying to do, though.

None of this is impossible. Some of this may even happen fairly soon, smaller parts may even be happening now. But I will lay money that it’s not all happening as we speak, which is what consultants everywhere would like their audiences to believe. The train is pulling out, the ship is sailing, everyone else knows about this (so why don’t you?) The proper attitude for the real hard sell is mild surprise that your clients haven’t heard the good news that you’re bringing them: the revolution’s here, guys! No one told you? I have developed antibodies to this over the years. In my own experience, scientific revolutions do not announce themselves on polished PowerPoint slides. 

By Derek Lowe

Pfizer tests new way to trial more drugs

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Pfizer has backed a new drug development company with the task of shepherding four of its experimental medicines through clinical trials, in an unusual deal designed to prevent promising products from languishing on its laboratory shelves. 

SpringWorks launched on Monday after securing $103m of funds from investors including Bain Capital, the private equity group, Orbimed, the biotech investor, and Pfizer, which has taken a minority stake in the group. 

Freda Lewis-Hall, Pfizer’s chief medical officer, said the pharmaceutical group conceived of the new company as a way of ensuring medicines do not end up being shelved, a common problem at large drugmakers that often unearth more molecules than they want to develop. 

 “If you think about today’s rapid pace of scientific breakthroughs, we simply have more leads than we can follow,” she said. “These compounds are exciting, but no one can do it all by themselves.” 

The phenomenon whereby big pharma torpedoes encouraging drugs has long bedevilled the industry. In recent weeks GlaxoSmithKline, Lilly, AstraZeneca and Teva Pharmaceuticals have announced they are abandoning some programmes to sharpen their focus on core areas.  

Pfizer is licensing four of its medicines to SpringWorks, including two that are ready to enter the final “Phase 3” round of clinical trials. (Más)

miércoles, 29 de noviembre de 2017

NOVARTIS: what next?




The incoming chief executive of Novartis, Vas Narasimhan, has vowed to slash drug development costs, eyeing savings of up to 25 per cent on multibillion-dollar clinical trials as part of a “productivity revolution” at the Swiss drugmaker.

The time and cost of taking a medicine from discovery to market has long been seen as the biggest drag on the pharmaceutical industry’s performance, with the process typically taking up to 14 years and costing at least $2.5bn.

In his first interview as CEO-designate, Dr Narasimhan says analysts have estimated between 10 and 25 per cent could be cut from the cost of trials if digital technology were used to carry them out more efficiently. The company has 200 drug development projects under way and is running 500 trials, so “that will have a big effect if we can do it at scale”.

Ver:

NOVARTIS: Quién es Vasant Narasimhan, «Vas»

Dr Narasimhan plans to partner with, or acquire, artificial intelligence and data analytics companies, to supplement Novartis’s strong but “scattered” data science capability.

Separately, he faces a number of decisions that will determine the structure of the business he will inherit from outgoing chief executive Joe Jimenez in February.

Key choices include 
  • whether to sell a 36.5 per cent stake in its consumer joint venture with GlaxoSmithKline
  • whether to spin out Alcon, its eyecare unit; and 
  • whether to sell its longstanding stake, amounting to 6 per cent of outstanding shares, in Roche, its Basel neighbour and rival. This stake has been valued at about $14bn.

Ver:

NOVARTIS / Joe Jimenez: Ahi dejo eso... La retirada.


 

 Last year 67 per cent of Novartis’s $48.5bn revenue came from its innovative medicines division, made up of pharmaceuticals and oncology.

David Epstein, who spent 20 years at the drugmaker, latterly as head of pharma, and is now an executive partner at Flagship Pioneering, a venture capital business, says: “If you look at . . . where the growth and real profits have come from, it’s almost all coming from the pharma part of the business. So the question is: what do you gain by having a generics business, what do you gain by having Alcon?

Previously Mr Jimenez has said that a spin out of Alcon could fetch between $25bn and $35bn. It says it would dispose of only 60 per cent of the business it bought for just over $50bn in 2010.

With months to go before he takes the helm, Dr Narasimhan, whose current role is global head of drug development at Novartis, declines to discuss his view on what he terms these “adjacencies”. He says, however: “I really think of our future as a medicines and data science company, centred on innovation and access.”(Más)

El sector farmacéutico tiene una importante representación en el ranking mundial de las mejores empresas para trabajar, publicado anualmente por Forbes. En concreto, de las 500 mejores compañías para ejercer, 23 son de la industria farmacéutica.

Al igual que ocurrió en la edición anterior, Pfizer se perfila como la primera del listado y lo hace en el puesto 47 (uno menos que en 2016, que aparecía en el 46). Le sigue Novartis, en el puesto 61; Roche, en el 79; Sanofi, en el 89; y Merck en el 100.



Más allá de esa cifra aparece Amgen, que repite el mismo puesto que había alcanzado el año anterior (131); pero también Gilead (134), Abbvie (143), Allergan (149), AstraZeneca (176), Mckesson (188) y GSK (194). 

Por encima del 200 surgen compañías farmacéuticas como Lilly (221), BMS (234), Abbott (242), Cardinal Health (281) y Merck (288).

Por otro lado, más arriba de la mitad de la tabla como las mejores empresas donde trabajar, los profesionales han elegido a AmerisourceBergen (315); Celgene (346); Takeda (348); Biogen (372); Novo Nordisk (375) y, por último, y cerrando este listado de entre las 500 mejores, Teva, en el 485.

La selección de las empresas ha sido efectuada a través de la recopilación de las recomendaciones de empresas empleadoras a través de métodos de recogida de estadística global y de encuestas de base regional. (Ver)

lunes, 27 de noviembre de 2017

Humor...es lunes: Despedida de Movember "con mucho tacto"...Gracias Michel.





La Asociación Española Contra el Cáncer se desmarca de la campaña de Valderrama 

 La AECC no apoya la campaña de Valderrama contra el cáncer testicular y asegura que los hombres lo que deben hacer es visitar al médico. En principio, el vídeo estaba subido a la web de la revista Líbero con el logo de la Asociación Española Contra el Cáncer, pero han pedido que lo retiren junto con sus siglas. (Ver)

Creatividad: Movember también dá la hora...




Oris becomes an official Movember Partner across Europe as part of its vision to bring Change for the Better.  
Oris is particularly proud to announce the Movember Edition, a special edition watch made in partnership with the international men’s health charity, the Movember Foundation. 
The watch is based on Oris’s hugely successful Divers Sixty-Five, a heritage piece inspired by an Oris diver’s watch first introduced in 1965. 
Oris will make a donation to the foundation based on sales of the watch. 

  • Automatic movement Oris Cal. 733, based on Sellita SW 200-1, with date at 6 o’clock 
  • Multi-piece stainless steel case and screw-in crown. 
  • Water-resistant to 10 bar/100 m 
  • Screwed stainless steel case back with engraved Oris shield framed by ‘Oris Movember Edition’ and Movember Moustache 
  • Black, curved dial with rose gold-plated applied indices filled with Super-LumiNova®. 
  • Brown leather strap with stainless steel pin buckle and heat-stamped Movember logo 
  • Presented in a special heritage box with additional tricolour Bordeaux red, beige and dark brown NATO textile strap with stainless steel pin buckle, stainless steel loop showing Movember logo and strap changing tool
Ver más Movember en PHARMACOSERÍAS

domingo, 26 de noviembre de 2017

Para_Pharma_Lia: Cannadom, Cannabis Flavour Condoms

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CANNADOM - THE CANNABIS FLAVOUR CONDOM.

There are dozens of flavours of condoms on the market to suit every taste; from Strawberry, apple and cola to coffee and pina-colada, so why not combine the two best things in life - weed and sex.

Cannadom condoms have the aroma of marijuana, and are coloured green like the plant itself. They are THC free so unfortunately, no effects are felt.

El uso de los condones es esencial 
en la prevención de enfermedades 
de transmisión sexual y en la planificación familiar. 
A esta necesidad del preservativo, 
ahora le agregamos el uso recreativo 
al añadirle el gustito a marihuana. 
 
A continuación, compartimos algunas de sus características:

  • - No causa efectos alucinógenos 
  • - Solo tiene el sabor, como si fuera el del chocolate, plátano o fresa
  • - Protege del contagio de enfermedades de transmisión sexual 
  • - Evita los embarazos 
  •  - Acaba con la rutina en tu vida sexual

Tomado de:
5 beneficios de los condones con sabor a marihuana

Cannadom condoms satisfy the rigorous quality demands of the international ISO certification and the CE stamp of approval required for sale.(Ver)

viernes, 24 de noviembre de 2017

Ratón de Biblioteca: Conejillos de Indias: luces y sombras de la investigación médica / José Luis Palma Gámiz






'Conejillos de Indias' es una exhaustiva y científica crítica que nos explica de manera sencilla y amena un complicado tema como es la actuación clínica y farmacéutica, cuyo fin sería combatir las enfermedades mediante su prevención y tratamiento.

 
El propósito de este libro es divulgar nociones importantísimas sobre el diseño, desarrollo y evaluación de los Ensayos Clínicos para iluminar, hacer juicios de valor y plantearnos interrogantes sobre la labor y ética de la medicina tantas veces cuestionada por los ciudadanos.

José Luis Palma, basándose en su vocación por la ciencia y acreditada experiencia médica, ha realizado una gran labor de síntesis del método científico facilitando así una mayor comprensión por parte del lector con un lenguaje atractivo, con precisión, sencillez y sentido del humor.

En este libro se pone de manifiesto los comportamientos de la investigación desde los más elementales comienzos hasta su compleja demostración y campos de actividad refiriéndose a la farmacología. Nos explica el fenómeno de los laboratorios y todo el proceso hasta llegar a la comercialización del medicamento y a los pacientes, que son al fin y al cabo los protagonistas y beneficiarios; sin olvidar los intereses del negocio de las industrias farmacéuticas.

'Conejillos de indias' es un libro que recomiendo. Muy interesante y esclarecedor el proceso de investigación, localización, identificación del producto, fabricación, reconocimiento y difusión.

En conclusión, existe una obligación moral de justificar un nuevo medicamento con pruebas cuidadosamente confirmadas en seres humanos, teniendo en cuenta el efecto psicológico.

Es una clara confrontación entre los ensayos clínicos y la realidad que subyace en las consultas médicas, en cuyas manos se regula el destino de los seres humanos." María José (Comentario  en Amazón

Visita médica: Sex, Drugs and Quarterly Goals, (IV) "Business and Pleasure"

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The world of pharmaceutical sales provides the backdrop for R/X, a soap-opera style webseries combining elements of comedy and drama. The tagline promises sex, drugs, and quarterly goals. While the latter may not inspire anyone to tune in, the former two certainly will!
It seems this series was made in 2007, so it's unclear why it's been sitting on the shelf for so long. The good news for fans though is that we're never left waiting too long for new episodes.

Ep. 4 "Business and Pleasure"



Ver anterior

jueves, 23 de noviembre de 2017

NOVARTIS: Cambiar la piel...?

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Novartis AG is considering a sale of its dermatology generics drugs business as the Swiss health-care giant seeks to shed some of its less profitable treatments and focus on growth areas such as cancer, according to people familiar with the matter.

The business, which is mostly based in the U.S., could be valued at between $1 billion to $1.5 billion and attract both private equity firms and other drugmakers, the people said, asking not to be identified because the deliberations are private. The assets for sale include skin-care treatments and some manufacturing facilities, the people said.

Novartis is working with a financial adviser on the potential disposal, which is at a preliminary stage, the people said. No final decisions have been made and the company could still decide against a sale, the people said. A representative for the Basel, Switzerland-based company declined to comment.(...)

Novartis has built Sandoz’s dermatology business via acquisitions. It bought U.S.-based Fougera Pharmaceuticals Inc. for $1.5 billion in 2012 in a deal to become the top seller of generic skin medications. Last year, it acquired the AmLactin skin-care brands from Minnesota-based Upsher-Smith Laboratories Inc. for an undisclosed amount. (Más)


Novartis exploring sale of dermatology unit  
Nov. 2, 2017 
By: Douglas W. House, SA News Editor

  • Reuters reports that Novartis has hired Centerview to assist in evaluating strategic options for its Sandoz dermatology business. Observers believe the unit could fetch $1.5B. 
  • The company is also advancing a spinoff of Alcon, worth an estimated $25B - 30B, but chief Joe Jimenez wants to see more growth before pulling the trigger.(Ver)

Colombia the new place to be...

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Descargar
With steady GDP growth, political stability and the best healthcare system in Latin America, Colombia’s life sciences industry has all the ingredients for success laid out before it. 
Indeed, with the domestic pharmaceutical market set to grow at a rate of around 7.3 percent and reach a USD 7.1 billion valuation by 2020, coupled with a booming medical device market set to reach USD 1.8 billion in the same time frame, Colombia is carving out a name for itself as the new place to be. 



This report features interviews with the representatives of numerous multinational companies eager to capitalize on this favourable scenario and ramp up their footprint in Colombia; not only merely in terms of establishing local affiliates but also opening regional headquarters and implanting managerial functions, partly due to the lack of ‘local content’ restrictions seen elsewhere in Latin America.

 

miércoles, 22 de noviembre de 2017

USA: Pharma´s Financializes Business Model (II) / Pumping Up Executive Pay

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Why do companies buy back their own shares? In “Profits Without Prosperity: Stock Buybacks Manipulate the Market and Leave Most Americans Worse Off,” William Lazonick argues that the only logical explanation is that stock-based compensation gives senior executives personal incentives to do buybacks to boost stock prices (Lazonick 2014b). There are two main types of stock-based pay: stock options, for which the realized gains depend on the difference between the stock price on the date the option to buy the shares is exercised and the date the option was granted; and stock awards, for which the realized gains depend on the market price of the stock on the date that the award vests (Hopkins and Lazonick 2016).

By using stock buybacks to boost stock prices and hit EPS targets, executives can augment the gains that they realize from exercising options or the vesting of awards. As shown in Table 2, from 2006 through 2015, the average annual total compensation of the 500 highest-paid US executives (not including billion-dollar-plus outliers) ranged from $14.7 million in 2009 (when the stock market was down) to $32.2 million in 2016, with realized gains from the combination of exercising options and vesting of awards constituting from 66 percent to 84 percent of the average annual total pay (Hopkins and Lazonick 2016).2 Stock-based pay incentivizes executives to take actions that increase the company’s stock price and rewards them for doing so. Buybacks are a means to these ends.

Pharma executives are well represented among the 500 highest-paid executives at US corporations. In the most recent years, as the average total compensation of the drug executives has soared even in comparison with the sharply inflated pay of the top500 as a whole, their numbers among the top500 have increased. As the average total compensation of the drug executives scaled new heights from 2012 through 2015, stock-based pay accounted for around 90 percent of the total.



Table 3 shows that, among the 18 pharma companies in the S&P 500 Index, a younger set of biopharma companies launched in the late 1980s and early 1990s account for the explosion in pharma executive pay. 



 Click sobre imagen para ampliar.

Table 4, which selects from all pharma executives in the S&P ExecuComp database (and not just from those companies in the S&P 500 Index in January 2016), identifies the six highest-paid pharma executives for each year from 2006 through 2015. 
Note the prominence, especially in 2012-2015, of executives from three of the biopharma companies in Table 3: Gilead Sciences (15 of the 60 cells), Celgene (7), and Regeneron (6). Also note the extent to which their pay is stock based. 

Gilead Sciences CEO John C. Martin appears on this top 6 list in all ten years, four times in first place, three times in second, twice in third, and once (2006) in sixth. (Más)

Ver anterior:
 USA: Pharma´s Financializes Business Model (I) / dividends & buybacks

Marihuana en la universidad...

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La Universidad del Norte de Michigan en EEUU ha agregado a su oferta de carreras universitarias un título de químico especializado en plantas medicinales para los interesados en sumarse al creciente negocio de la marihuana legal.

Ver:
Why Medicinal Plant Chemistry?


El año pasado las ventas en Estados Unidos de cannabis legal, tanto para uso medicinal como recreativo, ascendieron a 6.800 millones de dólares y para el año 2021 pueden llegar a 21.600 millones, de acuerdo con Arcview Market Research, una empresa californiana que hace el seguimiento de esta industria. 

Ver:
 The first study to get inside cannabis investor's minds.

Ante esta realidad, la universidad estatal ubicada en la ciudad de Marquette decidió crear el primer programa de su tipo en el mundo académico estadounidense. Por ahora, son 12 los alumnos que han iniciado estos estudios de cuatro años.

Ver también:

Ave "maria"...: Escuela de la marihuana en USA


"El estigma asociado con el cannabis está desapareciendo rápidamente, es el momento de aprovechar el incremento del negocio y de preparar a técnicos especializados para una industria multimillonaria", señaló Brandon Canfield, profesor de química analítica y ambiental y de quien partió la idea de la carrera. Canfield aclaró que el programa tiene poco de recreativo, a pesar de que la marihuana suele asociarse con diversión.

Una carrera difícil

Los alumnos estudian un programa muy duro con materias relacionadas con la química orgánica, la fisiología de las plantas, los suelos, botánica y geografía, biología celular y molecular, genética, flora boreal y equilibrio químico, con una introducción a finanzas, administración financiera y mercadotecnia.

"Para tener éxito, los estudiantes van a tener que ser muy dedicados y estar muy motivados", declaró. "No es un programa fácil. En realidad es un programa intenso de química y biología", agregó el profesor. Michigan y otros 28 estados de EEUU han legalizado el uso medicinal de la marihuana y, en otros ocho estados y el Distrito de Columbia, el uso de pequeñas cantidades de cannabis es legal para los adultos.

Ver:

USA Marijuana: A Changing Legal and Research Environment 


En California está previsto que comiencen a funcionar dispensarios de marihuana recreativa a comienzos del próximo año, una actividad que podría ser replicada a nivel nacional si su implementación se realiza sin problemas.

Programa de estudios



La universidad comenzó a publicitar el nuevo programa en marzo pasado e inició los cursos con 12 estudiantes, que se espera irán aumentando con el tiempo. Para disipar cualquier duda o expectativa infundada, los candidatos fueron informados de que la idea era graduar a químicos especializados en la extracción de ingredientes activos de plantas medicinales, incluyendo el cannabis. En la descripción del programa se aclara que los estudiantes y profesores no plantan marihuana, sino que solamente utilizan muestras en el laboratorio y no realizan pruebas para la industria.

"No es un título sobre producción, efectos o aplicación medicinal del cannabis", subrayó el vicepresidente de mercadotecnia de la universidad, Derek Hall.(Más)

martes, 21 de noviembre de 2017

FARMAINDUSTRIA: Asturias Patria Querida.../ Transparencia con nieblas

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"Si los médicos perciben 
de las farmacéuticas dietas y honorarios 
es porque la sanidad pública 
ha dejado en manos de los laboratorios 
la formación de los profesionales".
L.N.E 13.11/17



“Se ha delegado la formación de los médicos 
en la industria farmacéutica”
Alejandro Braña, presidente
Colegio de Médicos de Asturias.

Casi 700 médicos asturianos reconocen haber cobrado de las grandes farmacéuticas, principalmente por asistir a congresos, reuniones y simposios de carácter científico, a lo largo del año 2016. Se trata de aportaciones que oscilan entre los 15 euros por la inscripción a un congreso de una doctora del Hospital Universitario Central de Asturias (HUCA), hasta los 16.781 euros, incluidos los pagos de honorarios en metálico para otra doctora, en este caso vinculada a la Universidad de Oviedo.

“cada médico tiene su ética para decidir 
qué formación le parece adecuada”, 
porque es evidente que 
“las empresas farmacéuticas buscan un beneficio”  
A.Graña

En concreto, LA NUEVA ESPAÑA ha podido localizar a 690 facultativos asturianos que figuran en las listas de transferencias profesionales publicadas por las 19 mayores empresas farmacéuticas que operan en España. 
Es una información que de momento los médicos divulgan de manera voluntaria, pero que a partir de 2018 será de publicación obligatoria, según figura en el Código de Buenas Prácticas de la Industria Farmacéutica. 
En el conjunto de España, las farmacéuticas pagaron gastos a los profesionales por un importe total de 112 millones de euros, y abonaron otros 79 millones en concepto de honorarios. Se estima que menos de la mitad de los facultativos accede a dar sus datos.


El objetivo de las farmacéuticas con los congresos 
no es sólo formativo, 
también son eventos de marketing 
para promocionar sus productos” 
A.Braña
 



De los 690 facultativos que figuran en los listados de las farmacéuticas, una cuarta parte percibió honorarios en metálico por sus servicios profesionales, principalmente como organizadores o ponentes en esas mismas reuniones científicas, o por labores de asesoramiento o consultoría, en cantidades que por lo general se sitúan entre los 400 y los 600 euros, aunque en algunos casos superan los 10.000 euros.

Entre las grandes farmacéuticas, Janssen, del grupo Johnson&Johnson, es la que más transferencias realiza a los médicos asturianos: un total de 225 profesionales recibieron ayudas de esta compañía, 68 de los cuales percibieron pagos en metálico en concepto de honorarios. La siguiente es el grupo químico farmacéutico Esteve, que abonó los gastos de 171 médicos, 26 de los cuales también cobraron cantidades en metálico por sus servicios. Novartis y su filial Alcón Cusí realizaron transferencias a 90 médicos asturianos, y abonaron pagos a 17.(...)

El año pasado, el primero en que se difundieron las cifras exactas de estas aportaciones, menos de 400 médicos asturianos dieron su permiso para figurar en las listas. En esa ocasión, los datos se difundieron a través de la patronal Farmaindustria, que los reunió y sistematizó. Pero este año, las farmacéuticas han optado por difundir ellas mismas los listados, a través de sus portales web. Ese mecanismo hace más difícil acceder a esta información y analizarla.

No existe un criterio unificado para ordenar los datos, por lo que las empresas los ofrecen como consideran oportuno, y ninguna permite hacer una búsqueda por un criterio regional, lo que obliga, en la mayor parte de los casos, a revisar facultativo por facultativo para identificar a los que ejercen en el Principado.

Además, muchas compañías cuelgan los documentos en lugares poco accesibles. Merck, con sede en Alemania, aloja el documento en la web general del grupo, pero no en su página española. Pfizer, famosa por lanzar la Viagra, obliga al usuario a recorrer todo un circuito de requisitos antes de descargar el documento. Y Bayer no permite acceder a un listado completo, sólo a un motor de búsqueda por el nombre o la ciudad en la que ejercen los facultativos que constan en el fichero. 
Estas maniobras han sido denunciadas por la Fundación Compromiso y Transparencia, que también denuncia la opacidad de firmas como Esteve o Grifols. En definitiva, una transparencia que por el momento, se queda más bien en translúcida.

Ver: 
La Nueva España,13 y 14/11/2017

Ver también:

Citario / El dijo que...: Edelmiro Menendez, Presidente de la Sociedad Española de Diabetes y el "sponsorismo" de la industria farmacéutica.

USA: Pharma´s Financializes Business Model (I) / dividends & buybacks

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Price gouging in the US pharmaceutical drug industry goes back more than three decades. In 1985 US Representative Henry Waxman, chair of the House Subcommittee on Health and the Environment, accused the pharmaceutical industry of “gouging the American public” with “outrageous” price increases, driven by “greed on a massive scale.” 
Even in the wake of the many Congressional inquiries that have taken place since the 1980s, including one inspired by the extortionate prices that Gilead Sciences has placed on its Hepatitis-C drugs Sovaldi since 2013 and Harvoni since 2014, the US government has not seen fit to regulate drug prices. UK Prescription Price Regulation Scheme data for 1996 through 2010 show that, while drug prices in other advanced nations were close to the UK’s regulated prices, those in the United States were between 74 percent and 181 percent higher. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has produced abundant evidence that US drug prices are by far the highest in the world.

The US pharmaceutical industry’s invariable response to demands for price regulation has been that it will kill innovation. US drug companies claim that they need higher prices than those that prevail elsewhere so that the extra profits can be used to augment R&D spending. The result, they contend, is more drug innovation that benefits the United States, and indeed the whole world. It is a compelling argument, until one looks at how major US pharmaceutical companies actually use the profits that high drug prices generate. In the name of “maximizing shareholder value” (MSV), pharmaceutical companies allocate the profits generated from high drug prices to massive repurchases, or buybacks, of their own corporate stock for the sole purpose of giving manipulative boosts to their stock prices. Incentivizing these buybacks is stock-based compensation that rewards senior executives for stock-price “performance.”



The total of $261 billion spent on buybacks alone was equivalent to 56 percent of their combined R&D expenditures. That $261 billion could have been returned to households in the form of lower drug prices without infringing on R&D spending, while shareholders would still have received ample dividends. 
Or these funds could have been allocated to the development of drugs for high-priority access areas that are otherwise underfunded and underserved. (Más

sábado, 18 de noviembre de 2017

Grifols - Barça "fuera de juego" / Novartis - FC Basel sigue...

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Jueves, 26 de octubre de 2017

Desde que comenzara el sprint final del desafío catalán en torno al 1-O, algunos rumores han apuntado a que la compañía farmacéutica Grifols podría estar interesada en patrocinar el Camp Nou, estadio del FC Barcelona. 

Pese a ser prácticamente la única grande del Ibex que no ha abandonado Cataluña por el momento -al contrario que las otras más de 1.300 empresas que han decidido poner tierra de por medio-, esos rumores se han desvanecido. 

Según un escueto comunicado difundido por medios autonómicos, la multinacional señala que "en relación a la noticia difundida sobre las negociaciones entre Grifols y el FC Barcelona para asociar su nombre al Camp Nou, la compañía no contempla ningún patrocinio de este tipo". 

Queda en el aire una vez más el posicionamiento de los laboratorios ante el independentismo, aunque lo que queda zanjado es que el mítico feudo blaugrana no llevará su nombre -y el equipo no se embolsará los 400 millones de euros en 30 años que se habían estimado-. 

Tampoco será a través de este patrocinio la forma en que la compañía de hemoderivados, cuya sede financiera se encuentra en Irlanda y que realiza más del 75 por ciento de sus inversiones fuera de España, aumente su presencia en su 'amada' - bien conocido es el apoyo al independentismo del 'patriarca' Víctor Grifols - Cataluña...(Ver)

Ver:

Los Grifols, 'los vampiros de Sarrià': los separatistas que viven de la sangre española

Díselo a Cicerón: Victor Grifols...por que (no) se "arruga"...?




December 12 2016
Swiss soccer champions confirm local pharmaceutical company as main sponsor.

Swiss soccer champions FC Basel have confirmed that local pharmaceutical company Novartis will remain their main sponsor through to 30th June 2021. 

The renewal ensures that Novartis’ branding - which has appeared on FC Basel’s matchday shirts since 2004 - will remain front and centre for a further four seasons. 

Bernhard Huesler, FC Basel’s president, expressed his pleasure at the continuation of the longstanding partnership. 

FC Basel have won seven consecutive Swiss soccer championships, and currently sit 12 points clear at the top of the Swiss Super League. (Ver)