This piece first appeared in the Timmerman Report.

Some years ago when I was working for a large biopharma, I heard a story. It seems a senior scientific executive had visited and given a seminar in which he described the company’s portfolio of drugs for type 2 diabetes. The company was projecting great uptake and profits. A member of our site raised his hand and said, “But if people just ate less and exercised a little more, they could prevent type 2 diabetes and the market would disappear.”

The answer: “Yeah, but they won’t.”

Harsh! But that executive was right. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) recently published a paper in JAMA describing how much different health conditions contribute to private and public health spending in the US. Number one? Diabetes. Following that were heart disease and chronic pain. These are chronic lifestyle diseases with big environmental and behavioral components, and the data make me wonder if there’s an opportunity here for the industry to zig and do some things that, in the long run, may make drug development more sustainable.

I think it’s time for biopharma to get involved in public health. Continue reading →