GSK put their foot in it a lot. Here's another one. Drugs – Testing and Effectiveness Most people assume that the double blind, placebo controlled, peer reviewed tests carried out for and approved by the FDA for conventional drugs are "scientific and prove the drugs effectiveness". This assumption was blown out of the water by the head researcher at GlaxoSmithKline, Dr Alan Roses,who simply stated "our drugs dont work on most people". www.ghchealth.com/glaxo-chief-our-drugs-do-not-work-on-most-patients.html
Glaxo Chief: Our Drugs Do Not Work On Most Patients
by Steve Connor A senior executive with Britain's biggest drugs company has admitted that most prescription medicines do not work on most people who take them. Allen Roses, worldwide vice-president of genetics at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), said fewer than half of the patients prescribed some of the most expensive drugs actually derived any benefit from them. It is an open secret within the drugs industry that most of its products are ineffective in most patients but this is the first time that such a senior drugs boss has gone public. His comments come days after it emerged that the NHS drugs bill has soared by nearly 50 per cent in three years, rising by £2.3bn a year to an annual cost to the taxpayer of £7.2bn. GSK announced last week that it had 20 or more new drugs under development that could each earn the company up to $1bn (£600m) a year. Dr Roses, an academic geneticist from Duke University in North Carolina, spoke at a recent scientific meeting in London where he cited figures on how well different classes of drugs work in real patients. Drugs for Alzheimer's disease work in fewer than one in three patients, whereas those for cancer are only effective in a quarter of patients. Drugs for migraines, for osteoporosis, and arthritis work in about half the patients, Dr Roses said. Most drugs work in fewer than one in two patients mainly because the recipients carry genes that interfere in some way with the medicine, he said. "The vast majority of drugs - more than 90 per cent - only work in 30 or 50 per cent of the people," Dr Roses said. "I wouldn't say that most drugs don't work. I would say that most drugs work in 30 to 50 per cent of people. Drugs out there on the market work, but they don't work in everybody." Some industry analysts said Dr Roses's comments were reminiscent of the 1991 gaffe by Gerald Ratner, the jewellery boss, who famously said that his high street shops are successful because they sold "total crap". But others believe Dr Roses deserves credit for being honest about a little-publicised fact known to the drugs industry for many years. "Roses is a smart guy and what he is saying will surprise the public but not his colleagues," said one industry scientist. "He is a pioneer of a new culture within the drugs business based on using genes to test for who can benefit from a particular drug." Dr Roses has a formidable reputation in the field of "pharmacogenomics" - the application of human genetics to drug development - and his comments can be seen as an attempt to make the industry realise that its future rests on being able to target drugs to a smaller number of patients with specific genes. The idea is to identify "responders" - people who benefit from the drug - with a simple and cheap genetic test that can be used to eliminate those non-responders who might benefit from another drug. This goes against a marketing culture within the industry that has relied on selling as many drugs as possible to the widest number of patients - a culture that has made GSK one of the most profitable pharmaceuticals companies, but which has also meant that most of its drugs are at best useless, and even possibly dangerous, for many patients.
What comes out of this is that Dr Roses must have been doing his genetic tests for 'responders' and stacking his studies submitted to the FDA for approval of the drug with these 'responders' to ensure they were passed by the FDA, knowing that once approved they would not be effective for most patients. This shows not only how useless the FDA testing is, but also why so many drugs are withdrawn as being dangerous after approval. The testing is also ineffective at preventing vast sums of tax payers money being transferred to drug companies for a mainly useless product. Couple this with the recent scandal of doctors writing peer reviews for trade magazines and not even writing or reading them, and we have some idea of the so called "golden standard of medical testing" Quote | 
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