Word: merck
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...today.) He said research projects were being driven not by health questions but by financial considerations - a demand for blockbuster drugs to help pay for the 60% of drugs that don't return a profit. One result: an upsurge in marketing costs. In 2000 Merck spent $161 million promoting the arthritis remedy Vioxx, more than Pepsi spent advertising its soft drink. The big American drug giants in recent years have been outpacing European pharmaceutical companies, once the world's most successful. In 1990 Europe had the largest market share for drug sales, while today America has 47% of the market...
...Merck is moving forward with plans to test a more refined vaccine that may be available in five years. (Other groups are pursuing similar strategies.) Such a vaccine would protect against the two main cancer-causing strains of HPV as well as HPV-6 and HPV-11, which are not malignant but do trigger genital warts. It would be impractical to develop a vaccine against all 100 HPV strains, since so many are harmless. The types that cause garden-variety warts on the hands and feet are perhaps the most familiar to people and are not contracted sexually...
Researchers have yet to determine how long the anti-HPV protection of any vaccine would last and how many lesions it would prevent. It's already clear that the Merck vaccine would not be of much help to women who have previously been exposed to HPV. For any mass-inoculation program to be effective, it would have to target girls and possibly boys before they become sexually active. This could prove a tough sell for parents, not to mention conservative politicians and proponents of abstinence. And, of course, any vaccine that contains only HPV-16 and HPV-18 would...
...probably never met Myrtle Potter, but you may have taken some of the medicines she has marketed. At Merck in the early 1990s, her name became legend when she took charge of a struggling ulcer remedy called Prilosec and transformed it into a worldwide best seller. At Bristol-Myers Squibb in the late '90s, she worked the same magic on billion-dollar brands like Pravachol (for high cholesterol) and Glucophage (for diabetes). Today Potter, 44, is the COO of the world's No. 2 biotech firm, Genentech, where she's working to bring 20 drugs to market over the next...
Counting experience over ambition, Potter spent her early career making lateral moves and rejecting promotion offers. In 1982 she visited Genentech's South San Francisco offices to interview for a lowly sales position. She didn't get it, went to Merck and never looked back--until two years ago, when Genentech wooed her with a million-dollar bonus...