Merck 'Evergreens' Off-Patent Lipitor By Creating Combination Drug With No Additional Benefit
from the and-this-is-medical-innovation? dept
Big pharma often gets a rather rough ride here on Techdirt, what with its attempts to stop governments granting licenses for life-saving and low-cost generics in emerging countries, engaging in legal action to prevent drug safety information being released, and paying kickbacks to doctors. But sometimes you get the impression that drug companies really go out of their way to be disliked, as this great post by Josh Bloom on the Medical Progress Today site, pointed out to us by John Wilbanks, demonstrates:
[Merck] just received approval for the cholesterol-lowering combination drug Liptruzet -- a functionally similar (identical?) version of their own Vytorin, which is a combination of their statin Zocor and Schering's (now part of Merck) cholesterol absorption blocker Zetia (ezetimibe).
If it were just another case of trivial "innovation", the story wouldn't hold much interest. But there's something more here:
Liptruzet, ironically happens to be a combination of Zetia and atorvastatin (generic Lipitor). Yes -- Merck is substituting a former Pfizer drug for their own Zocor with combining it with Zetia to make a "new" medication with additional patent protection.[Liptruzet] reduced LDL cholesterol more for patients who took Lipitor alone, but it did not reduce patients' chances of developing heart disease. Not surprisingly, this left some doctors to wonder why it was approved at all.
Bloom quotes an interesting comment on this from Philip Gelber, Chief Cardiologist at Cardiovascular Consultants of Long Island:
"The modern movement requires that drugs not just be safe and effective in their immediate goal, but to also show efficacy in improving outcomes. Cardiac medications should not just reduce the cholesterol count, but reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke as well." He continues, "There was, I'm sure, pressure by big pharma to get this approved, which by pairing it with another drug, would in effect restore blockbuster Lipitor back to branded status."
That is, this is a slightly unusual kind of "evergreening", applied this time to Lipitor, from Merck's rival Pfizer, but now off patent. Before that happened, Lipitor was the world's top-selling drug:
Over 14.5 years, the cholesterol-lowering medicine has made over $125 billion in sales, and has provided up to a quarter of Pfizer Inc.'s annual revenue for years.
Bloom goes on to explore the FDA's role in this surprising approval of a drug that offers no additional benefit over Lipitor, and notes that the agency doesn't come too well out of this business either. As he concludes:
This episode just plain smells bad on many levels. I get the feeling that just about everything except science is driving this, and this will be a black eye that Merck will be inflicting on itself and the rest of the industry.
In other words, it doesn't look as if the pharmaceutical industry's image is going to improve any time soon....
Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: evergreening, lipitor, no benefits, patents, pharma, pharmaceuticals
Companies: merck
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
the revolving/revolting door has blurred the distinction between serving merck/monsanto/citicorps in their boardroom as an employee, and serving them on the FDA/FCC/SEC/etc as a gummint employee...
its called 'regulatory capture', and it essentially describes THE ENTIRE gummint and representatives, who have basically legalized bribery...
art guerrilla
aka ann archy
eof
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
You hit the nail on the head. Lipitor was not "evergreened" at all. Lipitor still has generic counterparts that works just as well as Lipitor always has. Indeed, I take generic Lipitor, and will continue to do so.
What is puzzling is the grasping as straws attitude that Merck is taking on Lipitor given that the "new" drug combination is apparently ineffective. Of course, a patent does not require that an invention be useful, only that an applicant claims that the invention is useful. If someone were to challenge the claim of usefulness in court, the patent might overturned.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
It's one of those instances where we get so wrapped up in correlation we can't see the forest for the trees.
1. People who die of heart disease tend to have high cholesterol.
2. Cholesterol must cause heart disease.
3. Drug XYZ reduces cholesterol.
4. Drug XYZ must stop people from dying from heart disease.
Much like:
1. Places where hurricanes have hit tend to have a lot of construction crews working.
2. Construction crews must cause hurricanes.
3. Burning down construction firms reduces the number of construction crews.
4. Burning down construction firms must prevent hurricanes.
Iron-clad logic.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
http://www.whiteoutpress.com/articles/q32013/supreme-court-rules-drug-companies-exempt-fr om-lawsuits/
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
This was obviously in 2009.
This is not an ineffective drug. It might not be *novel* and I wouldn't dispute it, but if you read up on Zetia testing you'll find, publicly, that the Lipitor+Zetia combo was identified very early as the best pairing, and going off-patent was clearly going to result in this.
-C
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
This tells me we need to change the drug approval process.
What needs to happen, in my mind, is that the structure of the approval process needs to be inverted a little: When a pharma comes to the FDA with a new drug, making claims that it improves over another drug, then the FDA should have the resources from its own budget to perform the study and evaluation for efficacy, safety, etc., and then if the drug doesn't meet expectations, then the pharma should pay a fine for wasting the FDA's time, in addition to getting the approval denied.
In this way, the impetus is less on producing more drugs to extend patents and massive earnings and more on making more efficacious and safer drugs.
Getting rid of the shareholders' opinions in this matter would also be of great benefit.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Patient Compliance
I will grant the 30,000 foot view of this looks sketchy, but the #1 problem facing the efficacy of medications is patient compliance. If we can take a regimen of pills a patient must take and combine them into 1 tablet, that in the end has tremendous positive outcomes.
Yes, it may not look good in research - yep, taking X and taking Y gets the same result as taking XY. However, in the real world, a patient will NOT take X 3 times a day and Y 2 times a day, every day. If they can take a single pill once (or twice) daily, compliance goes through the roof and you have statistically better outcomes.
You may not agree, and you may be compliant with your meds, but think of the 70 or 80 year old patient with that pillbox with dozens to take daily. Combining them makes a lot of sense. I hope this helps it make a little sense. Some people will always detest this practice, I get that, but it does have merit. You're very welcome to use the generic versions and take more pills daily. That's always an option.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Patient Compliance
[ link to this | view in chronology ]