Glaxo Chief: Our Drugs Do Not Work On Most Patients

A senior executive with Britain's biggest drugs company has admitted that most prescription medicines do not work on most people who take them.

Allen Roses, worldwide vice-president of genetics at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), said fewer than half of the patients prescribed some of the most expensive drugs actually derived any benefit from them.

It is an open secret within the drugs industry that most of its products are ineffective in most patients but this is the first time that such a senior drugs boss has gone public. His comments come days after it emerged that the NHS drugs bill has soared by nearly 50 per cent in three years, rising by £2.3bn a year to an annual cost to the taxpayer of £7.2bn. GSK announced last week that it had 20 or more new drugs under development that could each earn the company up to $1bn (£600m) a year.

Dr Roses, an academic geneticist from Duke University in North Carolina, spoke at a recent scientific meeting in London where he cited figures on how well different classes of drugs work in real patients.

Drugs for Alzheimer's disease work in fewer than one in three patients, whereas those for cancer are only effective in a quarter of patients. Drugs for migraines, for osteoporosis, and arthritis work in about half the patients, Dr Roses said. Most drugs work in fewer than one in two patients mainly because the recipients carry genes that interfere in some way with the medicine, he said.

"The vast majority of drugs - more than 90 per cent - only work in 30 or 50 per cent of the people," Dr Roses said. "I wouldn't say that most drugs don't work. I would say that most drugs work in 30 to 50 per cent of people. Drugs out there on the market work, but they don't work in everybody."

Some industry analysts said Dr Roses's comments were reminiscent of the 1991 gaffe by Gerald Ratner, the jewellery boss, who famously said that his high street shops are successful because they sold "total crap". But others believe Dr Roses deserves credit for being honest about a little-publicised fact known to the drugs industry for many years.

"Roses is a smart guy and what he is saying will surprise the public but not his colleagues," said one industry scientist. "He is a pioneer of a new culture within the drugs business based on using genes to test for who can benefit from a particular drug."

Dr Roses has a formidable reputation in the field of "pharmacogenomics" - the application of human genetics to drug development - and his comments can be seen as an attempt to make the industry realise that its future rests on being able to target drugs to a smaller number of patients with specific genes.

The idea is to identify "responders" - people who benefit from the drug - with a simple and cheap genetic test that can be used to eliminate those non-responders who might benefit from another drug.

This goes against a marketing culture within the industry that has relied on selling as many drugs as possible to the widest number of patients - a culture that has made GSK one of the most profitable pharmaceuticals companies, but which has also meant that most of its drugs are at best useless, and even possibly dangerous, for many patients.

Dr Roses said doctors treating patients routinely applied the trial-and-error approach which says that if one drug does not work there is always another one. "I think everybody has it in their experience that multiple drugs have been used for their headache or multiple drugs have been used for their backache or whatever.

"It's in their experience, but they don't quite understand why. The reason why is because they have different susceptibilities to the effect of that drug and that's genetic," he said.

"Neither those who pay for medical care nor patients want drugs to be prescribed that do not benefit the recipient. Pharmacogenetics has the promise of removing much of the uncertainty."

Alzheimer's: 30
Analgesics (Cox-2): 80
Asthma: 60
Cardiac Arrythmias: 60
Depression (SSRI): 62
Diabetes: 57
Hepatits C (HCV): 47
Incontinence: 40
Migraine (acute): 52
Migraine (prophylaxis)50
Oncology: 25
Rheumatoid arthritis 50
Schizophrenia: 60

Conservativegreatgrandma: " Natural methods are far more effective and safer."

Sharkhawk:" You can use nuts and berries to try to treat your cancer, as for me, I will trust science and Doctors to do their best."

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I'm one of those persons who prefers natural remedies. It's very, very difficult, though, to decide which supplements to use, and any doctor I've run into is clueless.

Obviously, the percentage helped by the pharmaceuticals is just fine, for those who are being helped. Where the problems occur is when a patient is taking so many drugs it's tough to see what's doing what and when doctors don't tell patients what natural remedies would also be useful.

Last year, an acquaintance had a horrible and lethal bout of ovarian cancer. Through the whole thing there was no suggestion to eat things like tomatoes and to get outside and take walks whenever she was able. That's so typical, that many doctors treat natural healing as the enemy.

Besides that, everytime someone gets ill from a natural remedy, there's an attempt to get it off the market. Health food/supplement stores are restrained from making claims. It's all ridiculous because those of us who prefer that approach pay for our own supplements. Just have us sign some kind of no-responsibility claim.

The following is an FYI:

From reporter, Jon Rappoport(http://nomorefakenews.com/archives/archiveview.php?key=1705)'

First of all, it is almost unheard of that a drug company executive will admit something is wrong in his own field.

And when he admits something is VERY wrong, you have to suspect the revelation is a hoax or a misprint.

But it’s happened. The UK Independent is carrying the story, and I urge you to look for how many (how few) press outlets around the world pick it up and, of those, how many feature it or trumpet it.

December 8, 2003. “Glaxo chief: Our drugs do not work on most patients”. Author, Steve Connor.

Here are the first two paragraphs of the story:

“A senior executive with Britain’s biggest drug company has admitted that most prescription medicines do not work on most people who take them.

“Allen Roses, worldwide vice-president of genetics at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), said fewer than half of the patients prescribed some of the most expensive drugs actually derived any benefit from them.”

Here is a direct quote from Dr. Roses. “The vast majority of drugs---more than 90 per cent---only work in 30 or 50 percent of the people.”

Which leads me to the third thing you know when a drug-company pro admits sizable problems in his own industry: HE IS UNDERSTATING THE PROBLEM.

Now, as this story breaks across the world, it will be very instructive to see how far out into the public and medical community and government it reaches.

Because, from any angle you choose to look at this, it is a hammer blow.

My guess it will penetrate about ZERO INCHES into government or the medical community or the public.

And I predict the whole story will sink like a stone, as far as media pickup is concerned. It will never make headlines. It will never form the basis for a crusade against drugs or drug companies or government spending on drugs.

From this point on, the story will be carried further by this column I am writing than by any other news outlet in the world.

Of course, you can go find the Independent piece and send it out to a hundred or a thousand people, or you can copy this summary and send it out.

BANG THE ROBOTS ON THE SKULL. See if they wake up. See if they budge from their locked-in stupor.

How can I possibly say that a story like this, breaking in a fairly major newspaper, will have no legs, will disappear from view in hours? How can I say that?

Because I’ve seen it happen before. Many times.

Because I’ve worked as a reporter longer than many reporters you read in newspapers (20 years).

Because I’ve watched my own stories that explode popular misconceptions and lies sink out of view.

AS I USED TO TELL AUDIENCES AT LECTURES, IF YOU WANT GOOD MEDIA, THEN BE YOUR OWN MEDIA OUTLET.

Don’t expect anyone else to do it for you. Invent ways to get stories out. Don’t worry about feedback and opinion, just get the stories out.

If you don’t want to use your real name, make one up. Hell, make three up.

Here we have a piece that torpedoes the whole drug industry, and the quotes come from a consummate insider at one of the world’s biggest drug companies.

THE DRUGS DON’T WORK.

This is like saying, the bridge that connects New York and New Jersey just collapsed.

You’ve got millions of patients gobbling up these billions of pills all over the world, and in the face of that a drug-company exec, whose company makes billions of dollars a year, says the pills don’t work.

Here is another quote from the Independent piece: “Drugs for Alzheimer’s disease work in fewer than one in three patients, whereas those for cancer are only effective in a quarter of patients. Drugs for migraines, for osteoporosis, and arthritis work in about half the patients, Dr. Roses said.”

Now, Roses is claiming there is a reason for this enormous drug failure. It isn’t lying and cheating on drug studies, it isn’t trying to kill germs with poisons instead of building up the immune system of the patients. It’s the fact that a person’s GENETIC MAKEUP predisposes him to utilize certain drugs well and reject others.

And that opinion, dear reader, may be the most damning statement of all, because this gene excuse is the old country well they go to when they have no other option, when their backs are up against the wall.

“It’s a genetic thing, and we have to test for it. We’re working on that.”

Yeah, well I’m working on a spacecraft that’ll take me to Jupiter in thirty seconds.

If you want good background on this issue, find the out-of-print classic, NOT IN OUR GENES. It’s written by geneticists who’ve been watching their profession turn into the garbage can for every desperate explanation and bailout in the field of biology and human chemistry. The basic thesis of the book is, genes control far fewer traits and functions than the charlatans would have you believe.

NOT IN OUR GENES, by RC Lewontin, et al. Pantheon Books, 1984.

What Glaxo’s Dr. Roses is proposing (talk about blue sky) is a future in which every person will undergo a few genetic tests that tell which drugs he will benefit from and which he won’t.

My, my.

That’s like saying, if we understand how cancer genes turn on and produce cancer, we won’t have to worry about how many tons of toxic carcinogenic chemicals people are exposed to. We’ll all be able to live in a sea of benzene. We’ll just turn the cancer genes off.

People don’t “respond well” to drugs because the drugs are toxic. And because the real long-term problem is not the germs the drugs are trying to kill.

To lay this failure off on genes is a sophisticated version of blame the patient.

Dr. Roses is really doing a quite elegant little episode of damage control.

The truth is, he’s winging it completely, just as 99% of the “genetics industry” is winging it completely, raising investment capital on fraudulent promises of a brave new world.

But there it is, in black and white, a rank admission by a major drug-company executive that his whole field is a fraud and a theft.

Anybody care?

http://nomorefakenews.com/archives/archiveview.php?key=1705

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