On some interesting news I read a few months ago, Pfizer’s (a major pharmaceutical company) patent on its impotence drug Viagra has been partially rejected after the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) said it wasn’t different enough from a Chinese herb called yin yang huo (more popularly known as Horny Goat Weed).
Yin Yang Huo (Horny Goat Weed)
We can learn a lot from the world of parasites, which in general also includes bacteria, viruses and fungi. The medical profession has long focused on bacteria and viruses more-so than parasitic protozoa partly due to the fact of how causes of disease have traditionally been identified. A pathogen had to be shown to be associated with a particular disease. In this respect it had to be isolated, grown in a pure culture, and inoculated into a host which would then produce the disease. The organism in the host also had to be shown to be the pathogen that the host was inoculated with. Bacteria and viruses were easily characterized as disease causing agents within these set of rules, but protozoa, despite their ability to cause severe disease, never really fell easily into this category. Protozoa have an extremely complex process not only in terms of the biological sense but also in terms of survival and the means in which they infect their hosts. (more…)
Sufferers of sleeping sickness
European Americans are ten to forty times more likely than African Americans to get a very aggressive type of skin cancer called Melanoma. People of Asian descent are more likely to have the inability to process alcohol efficiently – exposing them to more toxicity. People of Northern European descent have a predisposition for Type 1 diabetes. High blood pressure is twice as common in African Americans than in the rest of the American population. Native Americans have higher rates of tuberculosis, pneumonia, and influenza. I’ll stop there; the list is rather large.
I mention the above statistics to bring the point home for the need for more targeted or “personalized” drugs within the Pharma industry. A “one size fit all” approach for every disease/disorder simply does not aim for maximum effectiveness. Clearly the above example and more importantly common sense points to the fact that every human being is not like every other human being when it comes to appropriate medical treatment and disease prevention. Individuals have different germlines based on many factors within the evolutionary track of a specific population. (more…)
In April of 2009, Pfizer agreed to buyout Wyeth for $68 billion; Pfizer’s market cap at that time was just around $100 billion. The following month Merck trumped the Pfizer deal with a $41 billion merger with Schering-Plough. What was Merck’s market cap at the time? – Roughly around $50 billion. Not to be outdone, Roche rounded-up the mega-mergers of 2009 (so far) with a $46.8 billion deal to acquire Genentech. However, it must be mentioned that Roche already had a majority stake in Genentech (55.8%), so we’re really talking about $46.8 billion for the remaining 44.2 % of Genentech it did not already own. (more…)