A third company yesterday announced it would join a legal challenge to the ruling by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence to restrict the use of Alzheimer's drugs in the NHS, as protesters took to the streets around the UK.
Shire, one of Britain's leading drugmakers, said it would back Pfizer, the American pharmaceutical group, and Eisai, a Japanese biotech company, in seeking a judicial review of the process Nice followed in making its decision.
Nice has ruled that people with mild and severe Alzheimer's disease should not get Pfizer and Eisai's Aricept on the NHS, nor rival treatments including Novartis's Exelon and Shire's Reminyl.
John Freeman, managing director of Shire's UK commercial operation, said: "Shire completely agrees with the grounds and objectives behind Eisai's proposed challenge." But a health economist and a Labour MP who sits on the health select committee spoke out in defence of the beleaguered body yesterday and accused the drug industry of attempting to undermine Nice.
Alan Maynard, professor of health economics at the University of York, said rationing in healthcare was inevitable. Nice had made some good decisions in turning down drugs with very little benefit, including Avastin for bowel cancer and the Alzheimer's drugs. Speaking on BBC Radio 4's World at One, he added: "I think they are not being tough enough. "
"Industry has had high profits and high prices but has been very disappointing over the last several years bringing new treatments to market that are cost effective, and now they are trying to undermine Nice."
Source: The Guardian
1 comment:
I applauded when NICE came out with their verdict a few weeks ago not to pay for the acetylcholin-esterase inhibitors (AChEI), exemplified by Aricept, becaus they are ineffective. Now the big money interests are trying to beat them down in court. How disgusting! NICE is absolutely correct in their decision, and maybe if Medicare stiffened their spine a little and also refused to pay for drugs that don't provide anything but minor symptomatic relief this would send a message to big pharma that it is time to make something useful for the public. And FDA ought to be forced to exercise similar good judgment and not approve ineffect-ive drugs. Though providing some symptomatic relief, Aricept does not modify the course of the disease one whit. The patients pay a huge price for minor benefit.
Look at Pfizer's own data about Aricept at:
www.aricept/content/pi.pdf Data in Fig. 3 show that after 24 weeks 23% of the patients improved, but 12% of those on placebo did also, leaving a scant 11% of the patients better off with 10 mg/day of Aricept compared to nothing. In Figs. 2 and 1 a different test instrument shows similar unimpress-ive comparisons between medicated and placebo patients.
It has now been ten years since Aricept came on the U.S. market, followed soon by the other three similarly mostly ineffective AChEI but not a single new drug to treat basic Alzheimer's pathology has come on the market. A sad perform-ance by the pharma industry, but one for which they have been richly rewarded nonetheless. Could it be that there is little incentive to find a cure when the rewards are so great for palliative treatment that can't be quit, because there is nothing else? A real cure or prevention would sort of kill the goose that is laying the golden eggs, wouldn't it?
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