A Good Word For Big Pharma

Huge multi-national pharmaceutical companies, aka Big Pharma, tend to have a bad reputation among many of the people who study health care issues or are in need of exotic drugs to treat diseases. These companies are often portrayed as greedy, rapacious, and insensitive and that’s just how they are described in polite company. While I understand where the opinions of these folks come from, from the point of view of a Hepatitis C sufferer, my opinion is a bit different.

I am somewhat familiar with the issues of drug research. Several folks I know are gene-splicers involved in medical research working at companies as large as Genentech down to small, privately held startup level concerns. My wife has a science background (MS level) and has worked for research companies and I have a lifelong interest in scientific issues and some familiarity with the protocols and problems of medical research. I admit I have tended to be on the side of the folks with low opinions of Big Pharma in the past, due in no small part to the insider stories I have heard over the years. This has changed since I was diagnosed with Hepatitis C and changed even more so since I entered treatment.

There are two reasons for the change. The first is that private sector drug companies are the drivers for research into new ways to treat Hep C. The taxpayer-funded National Institutes of Health (NIH) does not exactly throw money at Hep C. For instance, while there are estimated to be 4,000,000 people in the USA infected with Hepatitis C compared to a bit over 1,000,000 infected with HIV, the NIH spends only about $20 per patient on Hep C research versus roughly $2,750 per patient for HIV. They have also been known to siphon off bits of that pathetically low amount and send it to other research areas. On the other hand, recognizing that 4,000,000 people is a large market for their products, the major drug companies are funding a wide and ever-increasing range of studies to discover new and more effective treatments for Hepatitis C. This is an example of how the profit motive can result in far more benefits for disease sufferers than waiting around for government funded research projects to begin to address the issues.

The other reason is the benefits that I and other people undergoing Hepatitis C treatment have received from the drug companies researching and selling the drugs to treat the disease. When I moved from treatment on the RO5024048 study to out-patient standard of care treatment, there was a gap between the time when I left the study to the time when my treatment and prescription authorizations cleared the insurance company bureaucracy. The people at Roche provided some samples of both Ribavirin and interferon that allowed me to continue treatment without missing any doses as the paperwork cleared. I don’t know whether the samples “fell off the truck” or are routinely provided so that the people at the Hepatology Center can deal with just such issues as mine, but they were a godsend. Likewise when my prescription for procrit fell through the cracks at the specialty pharmacy for a week and it looked like I might have to drastically cut my Ribavirin dose until it arrived, a sample of procrit was also provided by a drug company to give me the chance to address my red blood count issues more quickly and keep me on the maximum dose of Ribavirin.

Big Pharma also has programs to assist uninsured and underinsured patients to receive the treatment they need. There are programs directly from the companies themselves as well as foundation programs funded in part by drug companies that provide treatment almost entirely for free for low-income patients. One of the people in my support group had their entire treatment paid for this way. The only time they had to pay was if a part of the treatment was done outside of the California Pacific Medical Center.

While Big Pharma is far from perfect, they are the folks that those of us infected with Hep C have to look towards for improvements in treatment. Until the public profile of the disease is raised and the government actually begins to dedicate serious money to research, it is the private sector that will drive the research into new treatments. We 4,000,000 potential customers are all saying, you get something that is highly effective and we will push the insurance companies to get it to us and to cover it.