Même si le géant US semble mieux résister que MSD, même si MSD a récupéré le quart de sa capitalisation qui s’était envolée lors du VIOXX, l’impact sur Pfizer se répercutera sur toute la pharma qui est contrainte de modifier dans la douleur son modèle économique et probablement bien plus encore car l’arrêt du développement est lié à une surmortalité dans le goupe traité.
Voir en particulier les réactions sur the bioethics web log pour l’aspect éthique :
Two aspects of this trial, what surprisingly little we know about it, trouble me. First, the experiment took place largely in the offices of thousands of cardiologists across the country. What this means is that the subjects may have been induced to participate by their long trusted physician and signed on not to better mankind (or “Pfizer”) but because they believed their physician thought it was in their best therapeutic interest to do so. This might make the informed consent document neither voluntary nor informed.
Second, Pfizer says the delay in halting the trial was because this was a double blinded experiment with one arm taking Lipitor only and the other adding torcetrapib. Only when the data managing subcontractor removed the blinds were the devastating results revealed.
Call me naïve (I’ve been called worse), but why double blind a study where the data is comprised of good and bad cholesterol numbers? Does anyone believe there could be a placebo response that would raise good cholesterol? (…) And if this had not been a double blinded study, could the ongoing results have been known to the physicians and disclosed to their patients earlier?
et pour la dimension marketing l’article du célèbre John MACK Betting the Pharm.
Finally, the torcetrapib failure puts a monkey wrench into the ascendancy of commercialization over science. Some experts claim that, like it or not, “we are in an era where development of ‘successful’ drugs is going to be shaped by potential marketplace success” rather than clinical efficacy.
