NEW JERSEY, April 15, 2002: They say blockbusters headed the way of the dodo.

It does seem as though the age of the "mega-pharmaceutical brand" is indeed being tested. Generic competition is fierce. Newer agents from Vanlev to Rezulin have struggled or been removed completely.Merger-mania seems to have trickled. And many smaller, biotech companies have decided to focus on drug development, instead of licensing deals. Leaving bigger pharmaceutical manufacturers struggling to maintain healthy pipelines.

Plus, many of the diseases and conditions that affected millions of patients 20 years ago now have highly-effective treatments. GERD. Arthritis. Seasonal allergies. Many of the breakthrough brands in these therapeutic categories have sequels either arriving or already on the market.

With so many innovative agents introduced in the last 15 years, the industry has not only helped heal a lot of people, it may have also reduced the need for additional "blockbusters" in the future.

For patients, that has to be good news, right? It may not be delightful from a business standpoint, but from a healthcare perspective, it's a homerun, right?

Not so, say some doctors. Last week, the British Medical Journal claimed that the pharmaceutical industry has been creating diseases to push unnecessary medicine. It referenced pills being created for "non-diseases" like obesity and allergies.

Please.

I can't think of another industry that has such altruistic intentions and still gets this kind of criticism. Ask the millions of former allergy sufferers if they would like to go back to 1985 and suffer the drowsiness and or have to continue dealing with the miserable symptoms again. Ask the sufferers of reflux if they want to return to the days and nights of constant burning, the pain, and the reliance on OTC antacids. Ask the millions of arthritis sufferers if they want to back to the halcyon days of the 70's when they ate pain killers like M&Ms and risked burning a hole in their stomachs, or ruining their kidneys.

Chances are they'll all say a polite "No, thank you."

Sure, the medicines that were invented to help these people are called blockbusters because lots of doctors prescribed them -- because the need was there, not because the disease was invented. The simple fact is that people needed -- and still need -- these drugs to have the better quality of life they now enjoy.

Now with gene therapy advancing daily, and publication of the completed human genome to occur in 2003, medicine is indeed changing. One day, drugs will arrive that target the needs in specific subpopulations of patients, based on their predisposition to genetic factors. Blockbusters? Not likely.

Perhaps we have conquered many of the diseases that affected so many people around the world. Maybe the age of the blockbuster is fading. But we're not giving up. There's so much work to be done. AIDS. Hepatitis. CNS diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. And while we find it disappointing to hear that physicians could beleive that our industry has been creating diseases, we realize that no onesaid that the fight for better health was going to be easy.

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