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. 

Cancer: Dying for a Cure

Today's post is from John, who shares his personal experience of supporting a loved one through cancer and discusses how the way we approach cancer desperately needs to change.

Three months ago my wife died of ovarian cancer, after a three year battle to try to overcome her illness.  Her name was Beata and she was just 41 years old - a beautiful young woman with a beautiful spirit, full of love, kindness and excitement about the wonders of life.  We had been married for just six months when she died and were deeply in love - soul mates, best friends and a great team.

Like millions of others before her, her life and mine had been taken over by her cancer from the moment she was diagnosed.  Our lives revolved completely around doctor and hospital appointments, research into treatments and diets, and putting into practice healthy lifestyle changes that we hoped would make a difference.   She was forced to accept a punishing treatment schedule with systemically damaging side-effects and virtually no prospect of a cure, just to be able secure what little extra time she could.

She twice had major surgery, underwent twelve gruelling chemotherapy sessions that caused her a great deal of physical and mental suffering, participated in demanding clinical trials of experimental drugs, had ports and tubes implanted in her to make it easier to administer drugs and blood tests, and had numerous emergency visits to A&E to deal with life-threatening symptoms from her treatments.