Pfizer, United
Laboratories locked in a PR fight over high blood pressure drug
Arthur Sales
Pfizer, the world’s largest
pharmaceutical company best known for introducing Viagra, the golden standard
for erectile dysfunction, and Therapharma, a division
of United Laboratories, the Philippines’ biggest drug manufacturing firm, are
engaged in a public relations skirmish over the efficacy and pricing of amlidopine, reputed to be the only such product that is
approved and sold in 88 countries, including the Philippines, where about seven
million Filipinos have been found under a national nutrition and health survey
to be suffering from hypertension as well as a Philippine Department of Health
findings that only 13.6 percent of hypertensives are
aware of their condition since the disease causes minimal or no symptoms at
all, cannot be cured completely and is a life-long ailment.
Amlidopine, a product of more than 15 years of expensive research and
development by Pfizer, has become the most-sought-after medication against high
blood pressure because it is also indicated for the treatment of myocardial
ischemia and stable angina pectores.
Pfizer manufactures and
markets amlodipine besylate
under the brand name Norvasc at R44.75 per
five-milligram tablet but has since offered a 50 percent discount. United
Laboratories imports amlodipine camsylate
under the Amvasc brand from Hanmi
Pharma Co. of South Korea and retails the 5 mg.
tablet at R17.50.
Philippine Vice
President Noli de Castro called on Pfizer to be
transparent and to publicly disclose why it sells Norvasc
at a much higher price. Robert Pagdanganan, chairman
of Philippine International Trading Corp. (PITC), said the local firm found out
that the 5-mg. tablet sells at ten pesos in
Pfizer’s discount of 50
percent for Norvasc may be generous but the resulting
price of R22.50 is still more than four times the price of the Norvasc version sold in India, according to Shalimar Vitan, campaign coordinator in the Philippines for Oxfam,
the London-based relief and development non-governmental organization with
offices all over the world. Oxfam found out that 2005
sales of Norvasc in the
Patients suffering from
hypertension as well as consumer of Norvasc have
filed a motion to intervene in a case filed last Nov. 14 at the Makati Regional Trial Court under Judge Cesar Untalan.
Therapharma points out that both Norvasc and
Amvasc carry the same active ingredient, which is amlidopine, but with different salts (Besylate
for Norvasc and Camsylate
for Amvasc) and that the difference in salt
formulation does not change the efficacy, safety and overall clinical value of amlidopine but that it changes the pricing to make Amvac 60 percent more affordable.
This is not the first
time that Pfizer has run afoul of regulators of the industry. A few years ago,
the British Medical Journal reported that the board of directors of the
Association of British Pharmaceutical Industry reprimanded Pfizer for breaching
the industry’s code of conduct by promoting for "unapproved uses"
several medicines, including Isitin, which is known
as Norvasc in the
Leading the onslaught
in the Philippine Congress against high prices of medicine through the
introduction of a piece of legislation together with other congressmen is
Iloilo Rep. Fergenal Biron,
a doctor of medicine whose family runs a drug store. The bill seeks the
creation of a drug price regulatory board with the mandate of regulating prices
of selected drugs because the passage of the Generics Act of 1987 had not
resulted in lowering prices of medicine.
More than five years
ago, the US government, in pursuit of the Doha Declaration sanctioned at the
2001 World Trade Organization (WTO) summit at the capital city of Qatar, has
been prodding developing countries to accept its offer to sign away bilateral
trade agreements that could mean billions of dollars in trade benefits for them
but would take away the availability of cheap medicine from the reach of poor
people if they refuse to do so.
http://www.mb.com.ph/issues/2006/12/09/BSNS2006120981972.html