Testing Drugs on India’s Poor
19 Dec 2005My buddy Glenn is actively travelling in India right now so I thought I’d post this Wired article about Pharmaceutical’s using India as a clinical test bed. We both work in Bio-IT and although we’re not directly involved in drug discovery, we do develop tools to help track and analyze researcher’s data.
I wonder how much of it is true and just what can be done to stop it. In today’s global marketplace and given the emergence of India as an educated yet poverty-stricken nation, I don’t see why large pharma wouldn’t take the 60% cost savings and do a trial in India. Clinical trials are expensive and given that only a small percentage of them are successful, you’re forced to be operate efficiently.
The article goes on to mention that clincial trial exports to India are expected to top $2 billion by 2010.
In 2004, two India-based pharmaceutical companies, Shantha Biotech in Hyderabad and Biocon in Bangalore, came under scrutiny for conducting illegal clinical trials that led to eight deaths.
In another incident, Sun Pharmaceuticals convinced doctors to prescribe Letrozole, a breast cancer drug, to more than 400 women as a fertility treatment in a covert clinical trial — and used the results to promote the drug for the unapproved use.
Neither of those stories sound very good. You’ve got pharmaceutical companies inticing relatively poor and “treatment naïve,” people. Not a very good recipe for discovery and clinical testing of drugs that are going to be sold and distributed in the global marketplace.