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ARTICLE

"Consumers should give the pharmaceutical industry the benefit of the doubt"


By Marcos Lobo de Freitas Levy*

The population as a whole and several health care professionals are not aware of the long, uncertain and tortuous way to research and develop new drugs. Consequently, the pharmaceutical industry that focuses on new medicine research and development deals with one of the riskiest business in the world.

Indeed, studies published in 2003 developed by the independent institute, Tufts Center For the Study of Drug Development from Tufts University, located in Massachussets, US, state that the average cost to develop a single drug comes around US$ 900 million, it takes about ten years from its discovery to its likely trade. Besides, the study reveals that among eight thousand drugs researched, only one comes into the market.

That’s not for other reason that the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers & Associations IFPMA, committed to Research and Development, states that throughout 2002 the companies associated to them invested over 45 billion dollars in research and development.

As we get aware of the studies we can easily understand why so many research pharmaceutical companies have either been taken over or incorporated.

However, all of these data are not seen or known by drugs consumers or even health care professionals. What people really see is a very small even tiny pill or capsule that apparently cannot be charged the way it is regardless of its price.

That’s where the big pharmaceutical company gap lies in. It started too late and in certain places it hasn’t even started to educate its target audience about its importance. Such educational process is necessarily a continuous and long-term one and it must not be taken only when society complains or blames the company for taking advantage of one’s trouble by charging high prices for their products.

The consumer whose physician diagnosed any disease, even an ordinary one, is not willing to understand long explanations on why one has to pay a lot for the drugs, even though unconciously he knows the drug will make him feel better, cure him and even save his life.

The truth is that over the last years the industry realized the need of communicating with the consumer and has tried to do so. I believe that, instead of accepting wrong concepts, consumers should give the pharmaceutical industry at least the benefit of the doubt.

I am sure that open minds, free of any kind of prejudice, will certainly understand better the real role of the pharmaceutical industry and its importance, and they will judge it fairly.

(*) Marcos Lobo de Freitas Levy, former director of Boehringer Ingelheim Brazil and Merck, Sharp & Dohme, is one of the partners at A. Lopes Muniz Advogados Associados.

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