July 1, 2015
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
RALEIGH, N.C. – British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline paid out more than $175,000 to physicians in Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill last year, the Triangle Business Journal reported this morning.
The bulk of the money was used to support travel fees and expenses for physicians, although two doctors received tens of thousands of dollars billed as “consulting” or “speaking” fees, the Journal noted. The largest amount was paid out to Dr. Edward Nolan Pattishall, who received $59,000 from the pharmaceutical company. The next highest amount paid to a Triangle-area physician was $37,400 provided for Dr. Roger S. Rittmaster. Only 20 physicians received more than $1,000, with no others receiving more than $8,300, the Journal noted. The bulk of the physicians received a small amount to over food and beverage costs. The funding was disclosed on a federal Open Payments database run by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
In all, GlaxoSmithKline paid out $36.4 million to U.S. physicians in 2014. The funds were listed primarily as consulting and advisory fees, the Journal reported. GlaxoSmithKline said it is decreasing payments to physicians as the company implements a “new approach to working with healthcare professionals, including stopping direct payments to external healthcare professionals to speak on our behalf about our medicines by 2016.”
Glaxo has been working to restore its reputation after multiple global bribery and ethics charges have been alleged. In 2012 GlaxoSmithKline agreed to plead guilty and to pay $3 billion to resolve its criminal and civil liability arising from the company’s unlawful promotion of certain prescription drugs, its failure to report certain safety data, and its civil liability for alleged false price reporting practices. The resolution is the largest health care fraud settlement in U.S. history and the largest payment ever by a drug company.
Last year Glaxo faced allegations sales reps in Syria bribed doctors and officials to boost sales of its medicines, Reuters reported. Glaxo has also faced similar charges in China, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Poland.
GlaxoSmithKline was fined nearly $500 million by the Chinese government when it was revealed that some employees of the pharmaceutical company were bribing doctors with extravagant gifts to prescribe Glaxo medications to their patients. Additionally the company was also accused of violating China’s personal privacy laws through illegal videotaping.
In addition to overcoming damage from the bribery allegations, GlaxoSmithKline is also striving to overcome lagging sales. Although the company reported a 5 percent growth in emerging markets, sales in Europe were flat and in the U.S. sales were down about 10 percent as the result of formulary and contract changes to asthma drug Advair. Glaxo is under pressure to develop new drugs that aren’t threatened by generics.
To help bolster sales, Glaxo is plunking down $95 million over five years in a new nonprofit research center in Seattle called the Altius Institute for Biomedical Sciences. The Institute will delve into the human genome in order to better understand the role of genetics on disease and how a cell’s “operating system” functions in health and disease. Because of poor visibility into how medicines affect the inner workings of cells and tissues, many drugs fail in late stage development, which is extremely expensive, Glaxo said. Learning more about the function and control of a cell’s genes will greatly improve the probability of selecting and developing the right drug targets for the right diseases, Glaxo added.
Under terms of the 10-year deal, whatever Altius may uncover, GlaxoSmithKline gets the first chance to license the discoveries, as well as potentially spin companies out of it. Glaxo’s $95 million investment will cover the first five years of the decade-long partnership. Additional funding will be provided to apply the Institute’s technologies and discoveries to a wide range of drug discovery and development projects, including specific projects identified by GSK, Glaxo said in a statement announcing the deal.
The Altius deal is not the first time Glaxo has fostered a partnership with outside agencies in hopes of developing new drugs. In 2014 Glaxo co-founded the Centre for Therapeutic Target Validation in Cambridge, England. The CTTV has a mission to better understand the biology behind diseases. In May, Glaxo developed a partnership with the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill to develop a cure for AIDS.
While Glaxo is working with startups to develop new drugs, rumors are swirling that the London-based pharmaceutical company is ripe for a takeover, with possible bidders being Roche , Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer Inc. . Glaxo has a rough takeover value estimated at $143 billion.
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That’s lead BioSpace to ask, what do you think about the drug approval process in this country? Let us know your ideas.
