At the same time, when a breakthrough happens like with Gilead’s hep c drug, a single governing body is far less likely to educate and inform doctors that a major disease can basically be cured even if all the evidence points this to be the case. Think about how long it took the food pyramid to be changed despite all the evidence that you should be eating six loafs of bread each day.
Before I got in the industry I thought “what the hell does marketing do?”. Then once I saw what they do, I realized, no, most drugs don’t sell themselves, there is too much inertia for doing the same old thing.
The key word was good drugs tend to sell themselves.
If you develop yet another blood pressure drug or cholesterol drug and want GPs to prescribe it, you're going to have an uphill battle.
A blockbuster drug for HepC (where treatments before weren't particularly effective and had ugly side effects) will have a much easier time becoming well known amongst the specialists that treat the disease.
Do you think there could be a substantial time lag in that case though? Sure, some movies become hits with no marketing, but DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Ana Margo Robbie have been everywhere to market a movie with stellar reviews and a top director. Maybe that is a poor analogy. I’m not in the pharma industry, but to me, I’d hold my doctor accountable for prescribing me something I saw in a tv commercial, or not doing the legwork to understand why it could be a beneficial drug.
