Verified Document

Drug Company Ethics Article Review

Related Topics:

Pharmaceutical Industry The author of this report has been asked to review five Harvard Business Review documents from the recent years that relate to the pharmaceutical industry. From this review, the author is asked to summarize and offer several lessons learned from the cases as it relates to the power and limitations of the pharmaceutical market in addressing medical needs of patients. Indeed, there are some obvious lessons that can be cited in the reports. While pharmaceutical markets can solve a lot of problems and cure a lot of ills, the profit motive and the logistics of helping certain people prevent certain people from being assisted in a timely fashion, if at all.

Lessons Learned

One major challenge of the pharmaceutical industry is getting drugs to market. The process of getting a drug to market is long and arduous. Even when everything goes according to plan, the specter of lawsuits coming when a drug has nasty side effects is always looming as the trail lawyers are waiting in the wings. However, there has been some progress made with the timetables, at least, through the use of collaboration such as is described in the Harvard Myelin treatise published in 2010. Through such work, and just as one example, the foundation was able to identify nineteen new potential targets for developing treatments and they were able to do this in roughly half the time that is normally needed when organizations and researchers work alone rather than in collaboration like Myelin did. The less in this case is that when there is less fuss about profit and who will get credit, more can get done and with time horizons that are much less than is normal even under optimal conditions.

A similar lesson can be learned when looking at the work of Faster Cures. Their...

They created frameworks and systems to get patient feedback and participation for matters such as tissue banks and general medical research. One of the people behind Faster Cures was also deep into the philanthropy of pharmaceuticals. Michael Milken earned his MBA from Wharton Business School in 1970 and joined an investment bank. He earned a great amount of money from this endeavor and he then helped entrepreneurs get money for their businesses when traditional sources of funds would turn them down. However, his philanthropy in the medical field came both before and after that time as he would raise money for cancer as far back as 1950 in light of what was happening with the disease in his family. His fight for cancer was made personal when he got cancer himself and he then turned his efforts towards making progress for his own cancer fight and those like him that fought the same disease. To that end, the lesson to be learned here is that a personal axe to grind can lead to much progress being made for the person with the mission as well as others in the same situation. However, Milken was actually a great man that helped many others before he even got cancer. As such, that should be recognized in its own light.
In terms of what is normally expected from the market, many try to hold that drug companies are too worried about profit and not worried enough about doing the right thing and offering drugs at little to no cost in areas that sorely need it. However, to paint with so broad a brush is not fair and is at odds with is really happening in the field. For example, Indian drug maker Cipla has a dedicated part of its business that offers HIV drugs to people in areas where the disease is literally a pandemic. Dr. Yusuf Hamied,…

Cite this Document:
Copy Bibliography Citation

Related Documents

Drug Company Perks As a
Words: 657 Length: 2 Document Type: Article Critique

Patients have a right to know if their doctor's decision to prescribe a certain medication has been influenced by free lunches or other perks, rather than that doctor's objective overview of prescribing information. In fact, the real ethical issue presented in the underlying case is not that the doctors are accepting gifts from the pharmaceutical companies. Drug companies did decide to some degree of self-limit in their gifts to physicians.

Drug Advertising Ethics in Drug Advertising the
Words: 747 Length: 3 Document Type: Essay

Drug Advertising Ethics in Drug Advertising The marketing through direct-to-consumer drug advertising is a controversial topic. The basis of the ethical reasoning related to this manner is what role the patient should have in their treatments. If patients have the ability to diagnose their own afflictions then such advertisements might offer practical insights to the range of treatments that are available to the patient. However, most individuals would be much better off

Drugs & Ethics the Kalydeco
Words: 798 Length: 2 Document Type: Term Paper

The Orphan Drug Act is an extension of these ethics, but veers away from utilitarianism. The principle at work with orphan drugs is more deontological in its nature because it uses massive amounts of taxpayer money to provide drugs for relatively few individuals, under the idea that all Americans deserve their ailments to be treated, not just Americans with common ailments. From this analysis, Vertex appears to be operating with

Ethical Issues Arising From Doctors Relationships With Drug Companies...
Words: 1528 Length: 5 Document Type: Essay

Doctors Drugs Although the Affordable Health Care Act represents a step in the right direction towards encouraging all Americans to avail themselves of medical services, the bill fails to address the root causes of problems in the system. The American health care system is flawed because it is a for-profit model that places profits far ahead of patients. When profits come ahead of patients, the result is an inability to fulfill

Business Ethics in Drug Companies
Words: 3262 Length: 9 Document Type: Term Paper

Office Memo Sub: comment on John's claim as a whistle blower against PharmaCARE and the ethical and legal implications of the case As a member of Dewey, Chetum, and Howe you asked me to find out suitable ethical and legal implications that John's case could bring for the firm and for John himself. Detailed in the report are the issues regarding: The Ethical issues relating to marketing and advertising, intellectual property, and regulation

Ethics Business Ethics the Foundation
Words: 535 Length: 2 Document Type: Essay

Pharmaceutical drugs are among the most expensive products to produce globally and as a result have a major impact on the profitability of these firms. Without accurate financial reporting of these costs many investors have no idea of whether the companies are doing as well as they report they are. The second most troubling issue that is impacting the community and the pharmaceutical industry is the lack of credibility of

Sign Up for Unlimited Study Help

Our semester plans gives you unlimited, unrestricted access to our entire library of resources —writing tools, guides, example essays, tutorials, class notes, and more.

Get Started Now