Old Drug + New Disease = New Patent

Old Drug + New Disease = New Patent

There is an unsavory though well-established pattern of behavior among the big drug companies (collectively referred to as Big Pharma) to seek out criteria for “new diseases” in order to find new markets for drugs which have lost their original markets or whose exclusive patents are about to expire.

As an example, the drug manufacturer Eli Lilly was about to lose their exclusive patent of Prozac, the anti-depressant drug that is known to, in fact, aggravate depressive symptoms by increasing the likelihood of suicide in patients taking the drug. The end of Ely Lilly’s exclusive patent meant that other drug companies would be allowed to sell generic Prozac for a fraction of the cost. How did Ely Lilly deal with this threat to their most lucrative product (2 billion dollars per year)?

Easy, they 1) changed the name of the pill, and 2) marketed it to a new demographic – women suffering from premenstrual symptoms 3) invented a new condition called PMDD (premenstrual dysphoric disorder) – completely unrelated to the more common disorder PMS (wink, wink).

The “new” drug, “Sarafem,” thus became the only drug on the market approved to treat a brand new condition called “PMDD” (premenstrual dysphoric disorder). Ely Lilly changed the color of the pill from green in the case of Prozac, to pink in the case of “Sarafem.”

Armed with a new disease, a new color for their drug, Ely Lilly was able to obtain a new patent for a very old drug. As such, they are now the only drug company allowed to treat this new condition. “A lot of women would really be outraged” said Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, in a documentary called ‘Big Bucks, Big Pharma’ “if they knew that they were just taking good old Prozac, same dose, but priced over three times as much as generic Prozac.”

The suppressed documentary “Big Bucks, Big Pharma,” reveals this and other drugs that have undergone similar “transformations” for the sake of renewing expiring patents of drugs that contribute billions to drug companies’ bottom line.

New diseases represent entirely new markets, and as the above example illustrates, drug companies don’t hesitate to turn their operating strategy on its head: from creating new drugs for old diseases to creating new diseases for old drugs.

“Every marketers dream is to find an unidentified or unknown market and develop it. That’s what we were able to do with Social Anxiety Disorder.” Admitted Paxil (another anti-depressant) product director Barry Brand. The alphabet networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, CTV …) were more than happy to promote the “S.A.D.”: e.g. NBC’s Good Morning America aired a “special two-part series” to market this new illness.

“Experts” also often change the parameters of health resulting in tremendous boosts to Big Pharma’s profits. "All you have to do is change the definition of high blood pressure,” said Marcia Angell, “and you can increase that market by tens of millions of people. Or change the definition of high cholesterol."

Once again, the mainstream alphabet networks are happy to comply. The following are actual quotes from “news reports”: "Your blood pressure may have gone from normal to high over night. New government guidelines mean millions need a checkup. Do you?" "If you didn't have a cholesterol problem yesterday, you may have one now." "The new guidelines call for a huge boost in cholesterol lowering drugs known as statins." "The new numbers mean millions of Americans may be taking statin drugs for the rest of their lives."

Let’s hear it for the new numbers!

The same equation, Old Drug + New Disease = New Patent, exists in the history of the phenomonen I spoke of in last months issue of EU, namely that of HIV/AIDS.

From the beginning of the AIDS “outbreak” in 1981, AIDS was promoted in the public and the nascent AIDS industry itself as a “new disease.” In fact, as I spoke of in the article, it is actually a group of old diseases, like tuberculosis and pneumonia, with a new name.

Instead of coming out with a vaccine, and just as in the case of Prozac/Sarafem, where an old drug was made new again via the discovery of a new disease, drug companies found a new market, i.e. a “new disease,” for a very old drug, this time, AZT. Despite the perception molded by the media, AZT is not a new drug at all; it is a very old drug, which was originally designed to treat cancer, but was taken off the market because it was deemed too toxic to treat cancer or any other condition.

So, here we have the same equation: Old Drug + New Disease = New Patent. Here we have an otherwise defunct drug – with life-threatening side effects – that was able to be re-patented for tremendous profit thanks to a “new disease.”

Also, just as in the case of Prozac, which has been found to exacerbate depressive symptoms by increasing likelihood of suicide, AZT exacerbates the symptoms of the very disease it is said to treat. Yes, it causes the very illness it is supposed to treat.

“If you think about it, you put in a person – [who is ] making hundreds of thousands of new T cells every minute -- an inhibitor of DNA synthesis, because the virus needs DNA to be replicated. But, the virus is 10 kbps and the human DNA is 1 million kbps.
You’re shooting nuclear weapons at bunnies. Yes, you’ll probably knock out a few bunnies. But, the forest doesn’t look very good after your hunt is over.” Peter Duesberg, University of California at Berkeley. The forest, in this case, is the human body. It was precisely for this reason that AZT was taken off the market as being too toxic even for cancer patients: it had a nasty habit of killing the patient before killing the cancer.