Will competition in Hep C drug market bring down costs? #hepatitis

Lots of health news emerges from investor events like this week’s J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. The Globe’s Robert Weisman reports this morning on competition for Cambridge-based (soon to be Boston-based) Vertex Pharmaceuticals.

SAN FRANCISCO – It was supposed to be a victory lap for Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc. executives: their first appearance at the life sciences industry’s most important annual conclave since the Cambridge biotechnology company won long-sought approval of its potential blockbuster drug to treat hepatitis C.

But the Vertex team, including the departing chief executive and his newly appointed successor, was partly upstaged by an announcement on the eve of the 30th annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference that the giant drug maker Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. was entering the hepatitis C market.

Bristol-Myers said it will spend $2.5 billion to buy Inhibitex Inc., which is developing a next-generation hepatitis C treatment that will compete with two being developed by Vertex.

As he notes, the company’s stock price has dropped from $58.87 in May to $35.68 yesterday.

Will competition also bring the price of Telaprevir down?  The Globe reports that the drug will cost between $30,000 and $50,000 per treatment.

In the meantime, the company is building a new waterfron tower.The Globe also reports that the new headquarters will cost $2 billion. Boston will kick in a $11.8 million tax break, for the company, which is now located in Cambridge.

MGH and the rise of psych meds

Tuft psychiatrist and blogger Daniel Carlat details how his education at Mass General focused on medication over therapy. In tomorrow’s NYTimes Magazine features his story  “Mind over Meds: How I decided my psychiatry patients needed more from me than prescriptions.”

He takes us back to MGH to explain.

 …(On)a steamy July day in 1992, I stood on a Boston street, far from home, gazing at Massachusetts General Hospital (known as M.G.H.), where I was about to start my training.

This was a momentous time at M.G.H. Prozac was introduced four years earlier and became the best-selling psychiatric medication of all time. Zoloft and Paxil, two similar medications, were in the pipeline, and many of the key clinical trials for these antidepressants were conducted by psychiatrists at M.G.H. who were to become my mentors. M.G.H. and other top programs were enthralled with neurobiology, the new medications and the millions of dollars in industry grants that accompanied them. It was hard not to get caught up in the excitement of the drug approach to treatment. Psychopharmacology was infinitely easier to master than therapy, because it involved a teachable, systematic method. First, we memorized the DSM criteria for the major disorders, then we learned how to ask the patient the right questions, then we pieced together a diagnosis and finally we matched a medication with the symptoms.

 BHN links to his blog — to your right –  at  “Pharma and med ed”

For more on MGH psychiatrists’ excitement over those industry grants, see The Boston Globe’s reporting on pharma funding and conflicts of interest at MGH.

Radio Boston: The Influence of Pharma on Docs

WBUR’s Radio Boston takes on the ever-present issue of the influence of drug makers on docs. Listen on their web site or today at 3. Guests include:

Jerry Avorn, M.D., PChief of the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics in the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and author of Powerful Medicines: The Benefits, Risks and Costs of Prescription Drugs.

Leslie Jackowski, M.B.B.S. (M.D.), Exeuctive Director for Program at the ALOSA Foundation a nonprofit organization “dedicated to the dissemination of accurate, unbiased, evidence-based and non-commercial information about medications for health care professionals and patients by providing educational services (interactive outreach to physicians, classes, presentations, seminars, conferences) about the development, regulation, risks, and benefits of prescription drugs.” In other words, they come in after the drug companies pitch their drugs and give other docs more objective information about meds.  The scientific jargon for this is “counter-detailing,’ a reference to the term “detail man” used to describe drug reps who do direct sales to docs. That term is no longer relevant, especially since many detail men are now young, attractive women.

Thomas P. Stossel, M.D.,  American Cancer Society Professor of Medicine atHarvard Medical School, Director of the Translational Medicine Division at Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Founder of the Association of Clinical Researchers and Educators. For more on ACRE, see the BHN report on the group’s inaugural meeting, as well as a comment from former NEJM editor Arnold Relman. (Brother John Stossel, a crusading TV journalist who often takes on what he describes as “junk science,” just made the leap from ABC to Fox. )

Georgia Maheras,  Esq., Private Market Policy Manager at Health Care for All