I’m reading Mukherjee’s “Emperor of all Maladies, a biography of cancer” and am impressed yet again by the clueless nature of drug companies. So often the drug companies resist developing a drug that turns out to be a blockbuster, and only move ahead because academic scientists push so hard. That was the case with Gleevec. A scientist at Oregon Health Sciences University, Duker, tried constantly to convince Ciba Geigy/Novartis that this was something they wanted to develop. They resisted. The really funny thing is that they resisted, as drug companies often do, because they didn’t want to spend $100 million on clinical trials for a drug that would only be used by a few thousand people. However, this was the dream drug, from a business standpoint. Gleevec doesn’t cure chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML). It merely keeps the disease at bay. So patients have to take it for the rest of their lives. And current, living patients (who before would have died) are joined by new CML patients. One person estimates that there will be over 250,000 people living with CML in the next ten years. Multiply that by $40,000 a year, for ten or twenty years until the patent runs out, and you have a huge moneymaker.
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