Reuters story on Amgen EPO

[James Love <love@cptech.org>]

This is David Lawsky's Reuters story on the Amgen EPO issue.
jamie

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http://biz.yahoo.com/finance/980416/nader_char_2.html
Thursday April 16, 11:57 pm Eastern Time

Nader charges Amgen won't improve drug efficiency

By David Lawsky 

WASHINGTON, April 16 (Reuters) - Consumer advocate Ralph Nader charged
Thursday that Amgen Inc (AMGN - news). opposes development of a
substance which may cut the dosage of an expensive medicine for anemia
sufferers in half.

A company spokesman declined comment except to say the company had not
seen the charges by Nader and a letter he had faxed.

``We're not going to have any other comment,'' said David Kaye, the
company spokesman.

Amgen patented a method for producing a bioengineered drug called
erythropoietin, produced and marketed by drug companies under the name
Epogen, or EPO. The pricey drug stimulates the production of red blood
cells in people suffering from anemia, many of them infants.

Nader wrote President Clinton Thursday that Amgen had benefited from
government help in the past, but now was
shortchanging the very public that had aided it.

In the letter, Nader and his associate at the Consumer Project on
Technology, James Love, said that the product generated $1.16 billion
for Amgen in 1997.

``They're in a conflict where their desire to maximize their profits is
damaging the interests of their patients,'' said Nader in an interview.

``And that's exactly the problem we've always had with the profit motive
in health care,'' Nader said. ``It's the government's role to diminish
that rough edge.''

In the early 1990s a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in
Berkeley, Calif., discovered a protein in normal people that guarded
EPO, permitting it to stimulate the production of blood cells for
precious additional hours before it was metabolized or excreted.

Gisella Clemons, the scientist, said in an interview Thursday that she
wants no part of the controversy now surrounding her discovery. Her
research was funded by the government.

``I do not have an ax to grind with Amgen,'' the endocrinologist, who is
retired, told Reuters in a telephone interview from her mother's home in
Bremen, Germany, where she was visiting.

But a Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory specialist in the marketing and
licensing of discoveries was concerned.

``Amgen wasn't interested (in the discovery) because it would decrease
their lucrative market for EPO,'' wrote Martha Luehrmann in an e-mail to
James Love earlier this month.

``People would need much less EPO per dose and Amgen didn't trust that
they could make up the shortfall in selling more widely to people who at
the present time can't afford the drug,'' she wrote.

Luehrmann wrote that ``other drug companies weren't interested because
they would have to combine the binding protein with EPO and all the
rights to EPO were in the hands of Amgen.''

A spokesman for the laboratory, Ron Kolb, said that it had no
institutional position about the controversy.

``Our job has been to take a scientist's patented discovery and license
it,'' he said. ``To date, we've been unsuccessful in doing it'' with the
discovery by Clemons. 

END OF REUTERS STORY
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The actual letters are on the Web at:
http://www.cptech.org/pharm/amgen.html