Patient activism on the Internet is helping motivate Novartis to expedite the development and U.S. government approval of STI 571, company officials concede.

In an interview published in the August 2000 issue of Pharmaceutical Executive eHealth Supplement, Paulo Costa, president and CEO of Novartis USA, says patient pressure on drug companies — such as a 4,000-signature petition spearheaded on the Internet by patients with chronic myelogenous leukemia pushing for the development of STI — is forcing pharmaceutical manufacturers to take heed of more than just profits and their own internal interests.

But the response to patients by drug companies has to be justified, Costa says in an article titled What Chief Execs Do Know About the Internet.

"If we have a breakthrough in an area that offers significant hope of benefits that are currently unavailable, I fully expect to get a lot of pressure from patients."

"In the case of STI-571, the results were so remarkable — a 100 percent remission in patients with chronic leukemia — that if the patients were not jumping up and down I would be surprised," Costa says in the article. "They should be. What that will do is force companies to be very responsive.

"It is unlikely to happen for improvements that are not very significant," Costa adds. "But if we have a breakthrough in an area that offers significant hope of benefits that are currently unavailable, I fully expect to get a lot of pressure from patients. The industry will just have to learn to deal with it. In our case we responded very quickly and moved from producing the drug in a pilot plant to a 20-ton capacity program in a couple of months."

In the article, discussion moderator Dr. Stan Bernard of Bernard Associates asks Costa if such patient activism will force drug companies to take directions they wouldn't otherwise take, such as forcing the continued development of a drug that the pharmaceutical company might want to abandon if it shows little market potential. "That seems in opposition to the idea that you can be market-conscious for every drug in development," Bernard tells Costa.

But Costa says that although the pharmaceutical industry must make a profit, it also has a social responsibility in drug development.

"In the case of CML, it is only 5,000 patients per year in the United States," Costa notes in the article. "What drives us here is not the potential commercial return. What drives us is that this is an incredible compound that also offers significant hope. There is no way that we could walk away from it. We have a responsibility to bring it to patients, and we really don't care how much it costs. We wouldn't use the same criteria for something that brings a marginal improvement; we would be more hard-nosed about the economics. But when you have a drug like that, you have the responsibility to do what's right for patients. That's part of our reason for existing."

Novartis' attitude, Bernard says, sets a great example for the industry.

"People at Novartis are extremely proud we are doing it," Costa replies." With the internal impact of developing this drug aggressively and knowing that it will do a lot of good for those patients, it pays itself just in how the employees feel about the company."

Source: CMLSupport.com

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