Play PharMADNESS

Many of us are aware that the current system for developing new medicines relies on private pharmaceutical companies who have a duty to maximise returns for shareholders.  But it isn’t always easy to understand how the conflict of interest between the needs of shareholders and patients can manifest itself in sub-optimal benefits for patients and lead to a sub-optimal use of public investment in medical research.

To highlight these issues and raise awareness of how the current profit-led system for medical R&D is letting down patients, the Missing Medicines campaign has produced a clever online game that puts you in the seat of a Big Pharma Exec, running your own pharmaceutical company.




The game asks you to make annual decisions on which drugs to invest in and how much you want to spend on key areas like R&D, marketing and legal matters.  By doing this it highlights in a very effective way the trade off between commercial and public health interests – a stark choice between making money and saving lives.

After playing a couple of turns of the game and producing large profits, you start to see the negative consequences of your decisions on patients; something which is explained further through some a number of videos.

Ultimately the game aims to raise awareness of the need to move away from the current profit-led approach to medical research.

To play the game now visit the PharMADNESS website.

Lively times for the pharmaceutical industry

Today's blog is from our chairman Robin Daly who is backing the Dying for a Cure campaign to urge the UK Government to implement measures to tackle the conflicts of interest between profits and public health in cancer care.

February was a ‘lively’ month in the pharmaceutical sector. GSK attracted yet another £37m fine for illegal practices on 12th February. Although a record-breaker in itself, as the largest fine ever to be handed to a drugs company by a UK competition regulator, for size, it pales into insignificance by their own standards, since they set the pharmaceuticals bar at the current record level of $3bn in 2012.¹ Fines of a few million like this can be seen as simply a reasonable marketing cost, merely serving to uphold the seemingly true adage, in this field at any rate, that ’crime pays’. This time they got caught out for buying the inactivity of smaller companies that would otherwise have weighed in with cheap generic alternatives to a GSK blockbuster, once their patent had expired. By paying out £50m, they managed to ‘suppress’ any competition and keep the gravy-train rolling a bit longer.² Seroxat sales in one year in the UK alone were £90m. How a fine of a mere £37m is proportionate for this, I fail to understand. 

Another One Bites the Dust: The Demise of the Off-Patent Drugs Bill

Today's article is from our chairman Robin Daly highlighting some important issues and his views surrounding the Off-Patents Drugs Bill.

 Last Friday, Tory Health Minister Alistair Burt used a blatantly unethical tactic - filibustering -  to deliberately block a bill with massive potential to help a wide range of chronic disease and to slash NHS costs. The human cost alone of the suffering that is the direct consequence of this action is sufficient to brand it as callous, inhumane and inexcusable. The description levelled at Alistair Burt was ‘disgraceful’. His ‘assurance’ that there is ‘another pathway’ surely is a way of saying that there is another pathway that won’t have any negative impact on the bottom line of the party’s influential friends - the pharmaceutical giants? For what other plausible explanation can be imagined for blocking such a common-sense, practical and direct path to relieving human suffering.