thewayne | Entries tagged with pharma industry

That's $450.00, as in I can pull that out of an ATM pretty much any time. Not $450 million. A little under five hundred bucks, and they lost their lock on their second largest market.

The Slashdot summary says it best:
"Pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk forfeited patent protection for semaglutide -- the active ingredient in blockbuster diabetes and weight loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy -- in Canada after failing to pay a $450 maintenance fee in 2019. The company had paid maintenance fees through 2018 but requested a refund for the 2017 fee, apparently seeking more time to decide whether to continue protecting the patent.

When the 2019 fee came due at $450 with late penalties, Novo never paid despite having a one-year grace period. Canadian patent authorities confirmed the patent "cannot be revived" once lapsed. The oversight is particularly costly given Canada represents the world's second-largest semaglutide market, worth billions annually. Generic drugmaker Sandoz plans to launch a competing version in early 2026, while Novo's U.S. patent protection extends until at least 2032.

WOW. That's certainly going to tarnish some board member's CV. But it's going to make a bunch of Canadian's a lot thinner!

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/novo-nordisk-s-canadian-mistake

https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/06/16/1438211/novo-nordisk-loses-canadian-patent-protection-for-blockbuster-diabetes-drug-over-unpaid-450-fee

Ah, I love Bernie! Would like to move to his state to vote for him.

Anyway, he's the chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. And he called in the CEOs of: Merck, Johnson & Johnson, and Bristol Meyers.

The pharmacy manufacturers like to claim that it's the pharmacy benefit manager middlemen that make drugs so expensive, along with the cost of R&D. Well, not so fast!

Seems that a Senate investigation turned out that they are spending more on executive enrichment and stock buybacks than R&D!

LUCY! You have some 'splainin' to do!

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/02/big-pharma-spends-billions-more-on-executives-and-stockholders-than-on-rd/

The company is going bankrupt, and apparently their QC inspection department left early. According to the release from the trustee, "The discontinuation of the Quality program would result in the company’s inability to assure that products meet the identity, strength, quality, and purity characteristics that they are purported or represented to possess which render the products adulterated. While specific risks to patients, from use of these adulterated products, cannot always be identified or assessed, it is also not possible to rule out patient risks resulting from the use of such products. Akorn has not received any reports of adverse events related to this recall."

Obviously, it's hard to know who makes your pills if they don't come in the maker's bottles. I had two or three meds on this list: nasal inhalers and lidocaine/prilocaine cream. The inhalers were made by another company, but I scored on the cream. Two tubes, one unopened. Fortunately I had an add'l tube made by someone else, so throwing away the two isn't a big deal.

Walgreens gave me a call about the recall, but they wouldn't name any meds with the robocall, insisting I call them back. Personally, I'd prefer to look up what's going on.

This is twice in a year that a pharma bankruptcy has hit me. I used to nebulize albuterol, and the only company that makes the neb compound vanished in a bankruptcy and no one has yet stepped into that gap.

https://www.fda.gov/safety/recalls-market-withdrawals-safety-alerts/update-akorn-issues-voluntary-nationwide-recall-various-human-and-animal-drug-products-within-expiry

They are described as being of "low therapeutic value", i.e., less effective. So basically the drug companies are trying to sucker you into brow-beating your doctor into prescribing stuff that you saw on TV - which is going to be non-generic and much more expensive - and it is likely to be less effective than other drugs on the market.

Yeah.

So what we've got here is the pharma industry KNOWING that the drug isn't very effective, but they figure that if they put a lot of money into advertising on TV and in magazines that they can shift enough units to work towards recovering costs before the doctors find out it's less effective and start saying "No, I will not prescribe that. Here are more effective alternatives for that condition."

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/01/most-prescription-drugs-advertised-on-tv-are-of-low-benefit-study-finds/

https://science.slashdot.org/story/23/01/18/2122237/70-of-drugs-advertised-on-tv-are-of-low-therapeutic-value-study-finds

EDIT: I forgot to mention that there are only two countries IN THE WORLD that allow such advertising of drugs: the USA and New Zealand! How the Kiwis were suckered into doing this, I do not know. But as chained to corporate profits as we are, I don't think this will ever change. For me, this is one of the reasons why the mute button on the remote was invented: if I can't skip the commercial, at least I can silence it.

Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

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Entries tagged with pharma industry

Novo Nordisk loses patent in Canada over drug that underlies Ozempic - over $450!

Three drug manufacturing execs get raked over the coals by Bernie Sanders!

Do you have any meds made by Akorn? Check the list linked below if you do.

70% of drugs advertised on TV are less effective than others on the market

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