[Pharm-policy] Gerth and Stolberg story about Xalatan

[James Love]

This excellent article by Jeff Gerth and Sheryl Stolberg appeared during
the period when the listserve was broken.  Jamie


http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/health/042300hth-drugs.html

April 23, 2000


         MEDICINE MERCHANTS

         Drug Companies Profit From Research Supported by
         Taxpayers

         By JEFF GERTH and SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

              n Jan. 7, 1982, in a laboratory at
              Columbia University, a little-known
              science professor, Laszlo Z. Bito,
         finished a nine-month experiment on the
         eyes of cats. In his handwritten data,
         carefully charted in gray hardcover
         notebooks, lay the origins of what every
         pharmaceutical company longs for: a
         blockbuster drug. 

         The drug is Xalatan, a best-selling eyedrop
         for glaucoma. With $507 million in sales last
         year -- and the potential for billions more,
         most of it pure profit -- the four-year-old
         medicine is the equivalent of liquid gold for
         its manufacturer, the Pharmacia
         Corporation. 

The eyedrop earned Columbia University about $20 million in royalties
last year, and it has made a millionaire of Dr. Bito as well. 

Yet there are other, unseen, partners in the creation of Xalatan: the
American taxpayers, who backed Dr. Bito's work with $4 million from the
National Institutes of Health. The taxpayers have reaped no financial
return on their investment; their reward, government officials say, is
the eyedrop itself. 

Xalatan costs patients $45 to $50 for a tiny bottle that lasts six
weeks. That price -- about $1 a day for a drug that staves off blindness
-- may not seem excessive. But the key ingredient in that daily dose
costs Pharmacia only pennies to make, and Americans, who live in the
only industrialized nation that lacks government restraints on drug
prices, pay more than twice what
European patients pay for the drug. 

   [snip]
-- 
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James Love, Director           | http://www.cptech.org
Consumer Project on Technology | mailto:love@cptech.org 
P.O. Box 19367                 | voice: 1.202.387.8030
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