Do you trust pharma?

That’s a question I have been invited to answer at a meeting of the British pharmaceutical industry, so am interested to hear your views.

What are some of the issues?

Firstly, pharmas have been criticised for the way they educate healthcare professionals, for example paying for them to go to conferences and courses.

I should declare an interest there, as I have been taken to respiratory conferences by pharma companies. I’d argue that it helped me improve my knowledge of asthma research but you might have other views. Is it different if it’s a GP or consultant who’s being taken? Could such links distort prescribing practice?

You might have questions about R&D. To what extent do you think that pharmas invest in R&D that’s a priority to the patient? Is sufficient interest being given to developing new treatments for asthma? And if you have been involved in clinical trials, what was your experience?

Or maybe your concerns relate to the developing world. It might be OK for pharmas to price medicines in rich (well, we used to be) nations. But do they put too much emphasis on patents in developing nations who can’t afford them? What do you think of the Chief Executive of GSK’s proposal to put medicines into a patent pool for poor nations? Should other pharmas follow suit?

Or do you think the question of trust is over-played? Pharmas are tightly regulated, as you will see if you look at the guidelines published by the industry’s trade body, the ABPI (Association of British Pharmaceutical Industry). If only – you might say – banks were regulated to the same degree.

Let me know your thoughts and I will relay them at the conference.

For the record, Asthma UK works with pharma - we publish details of all our funding from pharmaceutical companies on our website. They must be corporate members of Asthma UK and we will not let pharma money rise above 10% of our income in any one year (not that it has got that far).

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