The pharmaceutical industry is definitely broken in multiple ways, but the fact that dollars drives most new research is hard to deny.

Tim

“As it happens, 3TC, one of the most widely used treatments for HIV and AIDS, was developed by Montreal’s BioChem Pharma Inc. And, the first genetic test for HIV drug resistance, approved by the FDA last September, was developed by Toronto-based Visible Genetics Inc. Both companies have been gobbled up by multinationals hungry to fill their new-product pipelines — Britain’s Shire Pharmaceuticals Group PLC and Germany’s Bayer AG, respectively. That still leaves more than 400 biotech firms operating in Canada.”

The Toronto Star’s article is no longer on-line that I can find, but there’s a cache here:
http://tinyurl.com/wtd5

I notice that Corante himself named a few more Canadian developments on November 25.

Olive also points out that big pharmaceutical companies spend billions on sales reps and marketing, because they’re caught in an arms race with their competitors, and channel much of their research money into inventing new versions of old drugs (time release versions etc), rather than looking for the “drug which will save my life someday.”

http://www.healthyskepticism.org/reports/2003/0717c.htm

I’m not sure if these companies could do anything different, because of this arms race, but that’s a reason to find other ways to develop drugs. The free market doesn’t seem to give the best results here.

Tim at Mooselessness (a currently broken weblog)

While the Red Sox were playing the ALCS (those were the days, eh?) he was interviewed by a TV station that was “looking for people who had the same names as members of the Red Sox or Yankees.”