October 23, 2007

Derek Lowe, at In the Pipeline, blogs that the idea that pharmaceutical companies use bogus marketing to shovel me-too drugs into the marketplace was dealt a serious blow when Pfizer withdrew its inhaled insulin drug, Exubra:

The next time someone tells you about how drug companies can sell junk that people don't need through their powerful, money-laden sales force, spare a thought for Pfizer. The biggest drug company in the world, with the biggest sales force and the biggest cash reserves, couldn't move this turkey. People didn't want it, and they didn't buy it.

The flip side of this is that even the drugs that folks love to hate, the ones that no one can figure out why they do as well as they do, must be doing something for some people. Perhaps other, cheaper drugs would do something quite similar, and we can discuss cost/benefit ratios, but you couldn't sell them if people didn't feel that benefit in the denominator. Not many people felt it from Exubera.

I think the market is even more complex than that: plenty of very good brand name drugs have lost patent protection over the last few years (and many more will do so over the next few years), offering consumers increased access to very popular, and very effective, generic drugs. Consequently, they are less willing to take a bet on a new drug that may not have a clear safety or efficacy advantage over existing products.

Companies will have to combat generic competition by offering consumers innovative new products and packaging them with services that consumers need. (Think disease management programs; personalized updates on drug safety issues; or tips on how to combine medicines with diet and exercise.)

At the end of the day, using a prescription drug is about trust - trust between the doctor, the consumer, and the company making the product. In the future, building trusted brands will require companies to become more personalized and consumer-friendly, and less oriented towards the mass-market blockbuster drugs that the industry became enamored with over the last 20 years or so.

This isn't going to happen over night, but the old silos are clearly breaking down and Exubra's demise is just the tip of the iceberg in a a power shift away from companies and insurers and towards consumers.

Posted by Paul Howard at October 23, 2007 03:16 PM

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