Behind the French controversy over the medical treatment of Covid-19: The role of the drug industry

This article explores the stakes of the very intense controversy that has developed in France around the medical treatment of Covid-19 (which finds some parallels in the United States of America). It centres on the therapeutic proposal of a Marseilles doctor, who has become a very divisive ‘star’ in public debates over the efficacy of treatment. The author shows that competition between this doctor’s proposal and the commercial hopes of a major pharmaceutical company plays an important role. This company has managed to create links of interest with many other major doctors, some of whom are at the heart of the decision-making process concerning the management of the health crisis. Finally, the author places this episode within the broader question of the hold the drug industry has on scientific production within the medical field. The interdependence between health authorities and the pharmaceutical industry is anything but healthy. The Covid-19 debate conforms to a well-worn pattern of behaviour: public backlash over the transgressions of wealthy corporate actors, government regulatory responses insisting on greater levels of transparency, corporate circumvention of said regulations, resulting in the continuation of fraud and corruption.

PP18 An Access Evidence IT Solution Within A Pharmaceutical Company

Introduction:During 2014, Roche tested whether the EUnetHTA HTA Core Model© was a useful, exhaustive and relevant value framework to promote efficiencies in scoping, storing and sharing health technology assessment (HTA) evidence within a pharmaceutical company. The conclusion was positive and Roche decided to build a cloud based information technology (IT) platform to store all relevant HTA evidence to support global and regional market access activities, tagged with metadata according to the HTA Core Model©., The platform should be user-friendly and promote efficiencies and knowledge sharing across the organization. Eventually this platform may also be used by external stakeholders to access relevant HTA evidence.Methods:In order to better equip global functions, regions and affiliates in a major pharmaceutical company with user-friendly and fast access to product-relevant HTA and payer evidence as well as access evidence plans, an easy-to-use IT-based platform was needed. The platform, internally called #TAg, is a central repository of information to support market access activities and promote collaboration between Affiliate, Region and Global teams. The platform uses metadata to label all types of evidence and uses the HTA Core Model© domains to categorize the evidence.Results:The platform #TAg was developed throughout 2016/2017 and officially launched on 1 October 2017. Within the first 30 days, the platform has been readily accepted by affiliates, regions and global functions through significant use uptake as measured by user registration and download activities. In addition, #TAg was used successfully in a pilot project for a submission to an external HTA body.Conclusions:A complete knowledge management system for HTA evidence is important for driving efficiency in scoping, storing and disseminating access evidence information within a pharmaceutical company. #TAg has so far proved a good start on such a system with further development expected in the coming years.

Purinex, Inc.

In June 2004 Purinex, Inc., a pharmaceutical company with several clinically and commercially promising drugs in development, expected to secure a partnership with a major pharmaceutical company sometime in the next four to 12 months. That partnership, if secured, would enable Purinex to develop one of its leading compounds as a drug. The company, however, had no sales or earnings and only 11 months of cash on hand. The student must assess whether the company should attempt to secure financing now or wait until it consummated a partnership deal. The tasks for the student include evaluating the probabilities that collaboration with a pharmaceutical company would actually happen; determining whether the company stay above water until such occurred; and analyzing the other risks to the company under these circumstances.

Strategy as Options Games

This chapter develops a framework for assessing the value generated by both the option-like and competitive characteristics of an acquisition strategy. The conceptual approach is based on real options and principles from game theory. It illustrates the approach with an example of how real options and games thinking were used in strategic decision making at a major pharmaceutical company. The method treats an acquisition strategy as a package of corporate real options actively managed by the firm in a context of competitive responses or changing market conditions. This framework can help management answer several questions that are important for a successful acquisition strategy: How valuable are the growth opportunities created by the acquisition? How can we best sequence the acquisition options in the strategy? When is it appropriate to grow organically, and when are strategic acquisitions the preferred route? How is the industry likely to respond, and how will that affect the value of our acquisitions and future targets? The subsequent sections present a series of frameworks to address these questions.

Cross-Cultural (mis)Communication in IS Offshoring: Understanding through Conversation Analysis

The offshoring of information systems (IS) work has seen phenomenal growth in the past 5 or more years. This has resulted in IS professionals, interacting with workers from vastly different cultural backgrounds, in order to deliver IS project and support services. This cultural ‘barrier’ has been highlighted in the IS literature as a key challenge for offshoring; however, the attention given to research in the field has in the main been restricted to surveys or interviews, often reliant on reductionist national culture models. Within the fields of linguistics and anthropology, the ethnographic research technique of conversation analysis (CA) has been successfully applied to cross-cultural communications. However, there have been no concerted research efforts to apply CA to IS research in general and to IS offshoring in particular. Our research aims to address that gap by analysing naturally occurring recordings of telephone conferences between offshore vendor staff in India and UK/US employees of a major pharmaceutical company. The research has identified and analysed two important phenomena observed within these communications. Firstly, evidence of asymmetries of participation across cultural divides has been documented, and analysed for underlying causes, such as different attitudes to hierarchy and a lack of shared understanding of expected responses. Secondly, differences in the rhetorical organisation of conversation by participants have also been observed and clearly documented within transcribed specimens of these conversations. These phenomena led to seven findings that are aimed to stimulate further research. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, this paper demonstrates how the methodological approach of CA can be applied to IS offshoring research, producing key insights into culturally loaded conversations with clear applications for practice. We hope that this evidence of the potential of CA in IS research will inspire IS researchers to use the approach in other domains as well as in further work in offshoring situations.

Development of an Orphan Drug by a Start-Up Company: MetroGel® for Rosacea

The Orphan Drug Act of 1983, along with the discovery of a new use for a known drug and an investor willing to assume the necessary risk, brought about the formation of a start-up pharmaceutical company. The primary incentive of the Orphan Drug Act of seven years of marketing exclusivity provided the protection from competition necessary for recovery of the significant research and development and marketing costs. The orphan product, MetroGel®, for the treatment of rosacea, required approximately five years of development before it was approved for marketing by the Food and Drug Administration. MetroGel® has become the number one drug in the United States for the treatment of rosacea. It currently is marketed in other countries through a licensing agreement with a major pharmaceutical company.