Just business
Half of the new drugs were no better than the old ones, scientists found
More than half of the "innovative" medicines appearing in pharmacies in European countries today turned out to be no better than the old drugs that they replace on sale. German doctors write about this in the journal BMJ (Wieseler et al., New drugs: where did we go wrong and what can we do better?).
"Health officials should take a more active position. They should not wait for pharmaceutical companies to decide to develop this or that medicine, but can formulate tasks and a package of measures that will help create the drugs that are needed to treat patients right now," said Beata Wieseler from the Institute for the Study of Healthcare Quality in Cologne (in a press release No evidence of added benefit for most new drugs entering German healthcare system – VM).
In recent years, scientists, politicians and sociologists have become seriously concerned about the rapid rise in drug prices and increased spending on healthcare. Every year, new versions of popular medicines appear on the shelves of pharmacies, presumably with increased effectiveness, but at the same time their price either does not change or becomes even higher.
Their development, according to many critics of the modern pharmaceutical industry, helps major market players to retain the rights to the "licensed" production of those drugs, patents for which will soon expire.
Something similar, in particular, happens with insulin, cheap "pirated" versions of which do not yet exist, since its manufacturers are constantly creating new, presumably improved versions of this hormone. Thanks to this, prices for some brands of insulin have increased sixfold in the last fifteen years alone, and for some other drugs, for example, medicines for HIV patients, they have risen by several orders of magnitude.
Wieseler and her colleagues checked how the situation is with other brands of "innovative" drugs that are now entering the markets and pharmacies in Germany. In total, over the past eight years, two hundred drugs have appeared that have passed the checks of European regulatory authorities and are recognized as completely safe for the health of patients.
The results of the analysis of their effectiveness greatly upset scientists. It turned out that only a quarter of the new drugs were significantly more effective than their predecessors. Another 16% were marginally better than the old drugs, and the remaining 58% were in no way superior to them.
A drawing from an article in BMJ – VM.
Moreover, most of the new drugs, as scientists have found out, suffer from the so–called "not made by us" syndrome - they were all based on the same mechanism of operation, despite the fact that they were produced by competing firms at different times. This suggests that the industry spends a lot of money on meaningless clinical trials and at the same time does almost no real scientific work.
Thanks to such trends, progress in many areas of medicine, as the researchers state, has actually stopped. For example, in psychiatry and diabetes treatment, only 6% and 17% of new drugs were more effective than their predecessors.
How did such a situation arise? According to scientists, it is due to the fact that regulators are mainly focused on assessing the safety, not the effectiveness of new drugs. This has been taken advantage of, in particular, by manufacturers of anti-cancer drugs, most of which have been approved in recent years without any evidence that they are beneficial to patients.
All this, according to the researchers, speaks in favor of the fact that WHO, the EU and national health authorities should radically revise the rules governing the work of pharmaceutical companies and significantly tighten them. In this case, as Wieseler and her colleagues hope, this will make them focused not only on making a profit from patients, but also on real innovations.
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