"Personalized" medicine for 1.3 billion people
AstraZeneca (AZ) has plans to dump $100 million into a new research facility in China. By itself, $100 million sounds like quite a bit, however that figure only represents about 3% of its 2005 R&D budget, and the payoff from such a move could be many multiples of that number. While the cost of living is much lower in China, and its hybrid communist-capitalist market makes drug pricing uncertain, AZ could stand to make money by the bucketloads simply because China's population is so huge. What makes this move of particular interest is that AZ is planning on using the differences in Chinese biology to its advantage.
While it's nice to think that we're all the same, and that differences in genetics are purely superficial, these variations have big implications for medicine and therapeutics. The most popular ethnically-targeted drug is of course the not-so-popular BiDil, the first drug approved by the FDA to treat a specific ethnic group. AstraZeneca hopes to capitalize on a much bigger market: the Chinese and by extension, other Asian races The shift was probably inspired by the failure of its cancer drug, Iressa, which shows greater efficacy in Asians than it does in Caucasians.*
An interesting turn of events, and hopefully a beneficial one for those of Asian descent. I'm of the mind that motivations are largely irrelevant if real benefits can be ethically produced. I suspect that we'll see more trends like this over the next 30 years as R&D methods improve and its associated costs drop with the progression of our computing and modelling capabilities. Emerging nations like China and India will find themselves the subject of greater interest of Big Pharma; I wouldn't be surprised to see Big Pharma as a collective start dropping billions into these emerging nations as drug pipelines begin to run dry here in the West, and (more importantly) patents expire. The big question will ultimately be "how profitable is tailored medicine?" and whether Big Pharma will continue its unethical practices of drug experimentation in countries like these where regulatory laws are more lax. I certainly hope not.
* White males tend to be the predominant human guinea pigs in most drug studies.
[tags]Medicine, pharmacy, AstraZeneca, China, BiDil, Iressa, race[/tags]
1 Comment »
RSS feed for comments on this post.
| TrackBack URI
You can also bookmark
this on del.icio.us or check the cosmos
[...] Fortunately for everyone, scientists have learned to play the PC game too, and they're doing so by referring to these genetic differences as "continent of ancestry" to remove the charged "R" word from the discussion. Hey, whatever you've got to do to further our understanding is fine by me. AstraZeneca is doing it in China, and I desperately hope the PC crazies don't succeed in shutting down funding of initiatives that are studying "racial" aspects of medicine. Whether society wants to accept it or not, there are certain genetic predispositions and differences common to specific ethnic groups. Naturally it goes without saying that these differences don't make one group any "better" than another. [...]
Pingback by Race vs. personalized medicine. “Me-too” drugs that matter? :: OnThePharm — July 13, 2006 @ 6:24 pm