Pharma Marketing, Advanced

With the Senate’s bill clearing late night hurdles, the coverage in the mainstream media is, at least for the moment, broad. But there was a segment on NPR’s All Things Considered in the midst of all that Health Reform bill coverage that is well worth a listen. The segment, “How A Bone Disease Grew To Fit The Prescription,” (transcript linked, audio below) functions as a sort of biography of the evolution of both a drug and a disease– which was not, it seems, an entirely independent process.

The drug is Merck’s Fosomax, the disease is Osteopenia. Fosomax had sales in 1996 of $281.8 million; by 2005, on the heels of what qualifies as a comprehensive and wildly successfull marketing effort, the drug had sales of $3.2 billion.  Osteopenia derives its origin as somewhat of an afterthought, when in 1992 “a group of osteoporosis experts gathered under the auspices of the World Health Organization” and drew a somewhat arbitray bright line to determine what level of bone mass loss was normal and what amount constituted a disease. The term “Osteopenia” was coined, on the spot, to give clinical researchers a term which described those whose bone loss was considered normal, but was close to the line. They never imagined that Osteopenia would come to be considered a disease in itself, but it did. Millions of women are said to have it; millions treat it with Fosomax. The story of how this came to be (and the implications regarding the role of Pharma in health care) is fascinating.