Drug Company Ethics

Pharmaceutical Industry The author of this report has been asked to review five Harvard Business Review documents from the recent years that relate to the pharmaceutical industry. From this review, the author is asked to summarize and offer several lessons learned from the cases as it relates to the power and limitations of the pharmaceutical market in addressing medical needs of patients. Indeed, there are some obvious lessons that can be cited in the reports.

While pharmaceutical markets can solve a lot of problems and cure a lot of ills, the profit motive and the logistics of helping certain people prevent certain people from being assisted in a timely fashion, if at all. Lessons Learned One major challenge of the pharmaceutical industry is getting drugs to market. The process of getting a drug to market is long and arduous.

Even when everything goes according to plan, the specter of lawsuits coming when a drug has nasty side effects is always looming as the trail lawyers are waiting in the wings. However, there has been some progress made with the timetables, at least, through the use of collaboration such as is described in the Harvard Myelin treatise published in 2010.

Through such work, and just as one example, the foundation was able to identify nineteen new potential targets for developing treatments and they were able to do this in roughly half the time that is normally needed when organizations and researchers work alone rather than in collaboration like Myelin did. The less in this case is that when there is less fuss about profit and who will get credit, more can get done and with time horizons that are much less than is normal even under optimal conditions.

A similar lesson can be learned when looking at the work of Faster Cures. Their work was different from Myelin but no less profound. They created frameworks and systems to get patient feedback and participation for matters such as tissue banks and general medical research. One of the people behind Faster Cures was also deep into the philanthropy of pharmaceuticals. Michael Milken earned his MBA from Wharton Business School in 1970 and joined an investment bank.

He earned a great amount of money from this endeavor and he then helped entrepreneurs get money for their businesses when traditional sources of funds would turn them down. However, his philanthropy in the medical field came both before and after that time as he would raise money for cancer as far back as 1950 in light of what was happening with the disease in his family.

His fight for cancer was made personal when he got cancer himself and he then turned his efforts towards making progress for his own cancer fight and those like him that fought the same disease. To that end, the lesson to be learned here is that a personal axe to grind can lead to much progress being made for the person with the mission as well as others in the same situation. However, Milken was actually a great man that helped many others before he even got cancer.

As such, that should be recognized in its own light. In terms of what is normally expected from the market, many try to hold that drug companies are too worried about profit and not worried enough about doing the right thing and offering drugs at little to no cost in areas that sorely need it. However, to paint with so broad a brush is not fair and is at odds with is really happening in the field.

For example, Indian drug maker Cipla has a dedicated part of its business that offers HIV drugs to people in areas where the disease is literally a pandemic. Dr. Yusuf Hamied, the managing director and chairman of Cipla, holds that the measure of success that should be used for a company is the amount of health regained by patients. The author of this report duly notices that he said nothing about profits or revenues in that statement.

Obviously, his company has to make some money as this is the hallmark and requirement of any business. However, the company he works for makes $1.4 billion a year so they are certainly making what they need to make and they are donating some of their largesse to a greater cause.

The lesson to be learned from this example is that while pharmaceutical companies do need to make a profit, they also have an ethical burden to help the poor and disadvantaged, both in their home country and around the world, as they are able to do so.

Another lesson to be learned is that while treatment of disease as it comes out of the woodwork has its money to be made, it is more humanitarian and ethical to do what is possible to prevent the disease from happening in the first place. It started with polio and Salk and a more recent example is Dengue Fever in Thailand.

Sanofi Pasteur believes in this lesson as well and has spent a lot of time and resources getting dengue fever vaccines to the poor and poorly cared for in Thailand. The stakes of Pasteur's fight are not the least bit small as 50 to 100 million infections are not beyond the pale and this is straight from the World Health Organization.

Pasteur and his colleagues had to pour in some major resources as earlier versions of the vaccine only yielded an efficacy rate or 30%, which is less than half (70) of what is typically sought after when developing vaccines. However, Pasteur soldiered on and better results came soon enough. A similar lesson is discussed in another report offered for this lesson review in the form of malaria. Like Dengue Fever, this is a disease that ravages the areas in which it inhabits. Mosquitos and other bugs spread the disease like wildfire.

This is another disease that the World Health Organization is.