Will A Big Pharma Pusher Come To The Big Screen?
1 CommentBy Ed Silverman // November 21st, 2008 // 2:44 pm
Brad Pitt and Matt Damon may turn sales reps into stars. Their production companies are reportedly looking at Andy Behrman’s tell-all book about his days as a paid spokesman for the Abilify antipsychotic for Bristol-Myers Squibb, according the Rush & Molloy gossip column in The New York Daily News.
Behrman, who wrote “Electroboy: A Memoir of Mania,” a memoir of mania, bipolar disorder and his experiences undergoing ECT, calls his latest “Adventures in the Drug Trade: I Was a Big Pharma-Pusher.” He was taking Abilify but stopped two years ago after some difficulties and severed his relationship with the drugmaker. The manuscript is due to go to publishers in January, after Behrman’s nondisclosure agreement with the drugmaker expires, the gossips say.
Hat tip to Furious Seasons
Cathy Lane RPh
There’s a great big, big problem -it’s a many, many headed Hydra, when discounting the importance of any sort of antipsychotic drug development.
First, and foremost–even in this last year, Scientific American has published articles about the brain presenting new discoveries in terms readily understood by the scientifically-trained, with upshot that there’s still an immense amount of neuropsychopharmacology that has to still be understood, as well as even the overall universal concepts of neurology, physiology, psychopharmacology, etc.
Second, the research in the field is difficult to objectively translate to subjective results. (I guess this makes for a rhinoceros and elephant in the room.) Look at how Abilify came out 4-5 yrs ago. It was promoted as low incidence of EPS and metabolic effects, but the research showed it worked. Yet, when you look at the research, the psych doctors use all sorts of scales that measure things that cannot be measured objectively. Plus, psych is a specialized field–sometimes it’s difficult to not just cross one’s eyes and call it ‘hooey’.
Now, the company comes out with a new indication as adjunct for major depression (maybe useful in bipolar disorder of one of the two phases), and who is it tested on in a giant multi-center trial (using all these dinky depression and psychosis symptom scales)–people that don’t have psychosis? The company shows it seems to improve symptoms for those with depression significantly as seen on their graphs. Yet, how do we know that depressed people aren’t generally helped by drugs that help with the obsessive thoughts that engender ‘depression’, and that folks weren’t prescribed anti-psychotics in the past because the zombie EPS were too sobering and scary to try first before drugs that took months for anti-depressant effects showed up?
And, then, there’s the matter of how individual healthcare professionals understand psychosis…a particularly intelligent sibling of mine was diagnosed with schizophrenia, yet, I can understand in my dysfunctional family upbringing how this ‘vulnerable’ person with a particular mindset could evolve, and come across to people that do not know her as totally ‘off the wall’. Yet, I as a pharmacist, know that any of the agents in the category of psych meds could ‘zonk’ her, with more or less of one major side-effect (EPS) than another. (I guess that’s the great American crocodile or alligator in the room.)
I think it’d do better to examine how Big Pharma works with other drugs like that one called Inspra (great alternative to spironolactone but terribly expensive) or why Lilly didn’t market inhaled insulin better, or even something silly such as the hydralazine combination marketed for HTN to those of certain ethnic ancestry.