Cashing in on drugs

RadioScope: The most profitable and powerful business in the world is the pharmaceutical industry. The profits of the major players such as GlaxoSmithKline, Merc and Pfizer are measured in billions, with annual reports that make the bank balances of their shareholders very healthy indeed.

In Pills, Profits and Patients, a new four-part series investigating the politics of drugs development and delivery, presenter Nigel Wrench goes behind the scenes to find out why some illnesses and diseases get millions of dollars in R&D funding when others don't. The conclusion he reached in his first programme boils down simply to money or, more accurately, profit.

Nine out of 10 new drugs are designed to treat 10 per cent of the world's population.

Heart problems and erectile dysfunction are some of the conditions whose drug-based therapies make the most money while the race is on to find a cure for Alzheimer's disease, an illness increasingly prevalent in the affluent West.

Meanwhile, malaria is still rampant because, as the researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, said "there's no money in malaria".

Somewhere in the world a child dies very 20 seconds from malaria and there are between 300 and 600 million new cases every year.

A current line of research being undertaken in the labs at John Hopkins is the development of a genetically modified mosquito, capable of resisting the malaria parasite. The research, Wrench discovered, is being funded by a $100 million private donation, enough to fund 10 years' research.

He concluded that if the world's malaria sufferers were affluent potential customers on a cash-rich continent, the disease wouldn't be waiting for personal philanthropy but would be the highest priority with drugs companies.

In its defence, the pharmaceutical industry claims that it costs $800 million to bring a new drug from the lab onto the shelves and the process typically takes around 10 years.

For every drug that makes it, thousands don't. Out of 10,000 potential drugs, perhaps 10 will be earmarked for future research.

Critics of the pharmaceutical industry say that the $800 million figure is inflated and that what should be looked at is the drug companies' vast marketing spend. Twice as much is spent on marketing as on R&D.

It's a fascinating radio series and because it's the World Service, each 25-minute programme is resourced to the extent that Wrench could go from the labs in London and America to the Kalahari desert, where a plant known by the indigenous people for centuries for its appetite-suppressant qualities could offer a therapy for one of the West's most urgent problems, obesity.