Essay about Case Memo: Merck Global Health and Access to Medicines

Those target markets who rely on Johnson & Johnson health and medical needs are mostly patients, doctors, nurses and civilians. Therefore, the company need to sustain their products and services over all these years to ensure that lower income people and underprivileged patients are able to access on their medicines. This however requires the company to balance patient’s access and competitive dynamics in line with their need as the company need to have enough resources to keep on being innovating, creating new and better medicines and at the same time making sure there will be a fair return to the shareholder as well. Johnson & Johnson also work closely with the governments, physicians, non-government organizations and the international donors all around the world to provide its products within an affordable prices to its

Improvements in health care and life sciences are an important source of gains in health and longevity globally. The development of innovative pharmaceutical products plays a critical role in ensuring these continued gains. To encourage the continued development of new drugs, economic incentives are essential. These incentives are principally provided through direct and indirect government funding, intellectual property laws, and other policies that favor innovation. Without such incentives, private corporations, which bring to market the vast majority of new drugs, would be less able to assume the risks and costs necessary to continue their research and development (R&D). In the United States, government action has focused on creating the environment that would best encourage further innovation and yield a constant flow of new and innovative medicines to the market. The goal has been to ensure that consumers would benefit both from technological breakthroughs and the competition that further innovation generates. The United States also relies on a strong generic pharmaceutical industry to create added competitive pressure to lower drug prices. Recent action by the Administration and Congress has accelerated the flow of generic medicines to the market for precisely that reason. By contrast, in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and

2. Patent related and Generic Competition: The developed countries like US and Europe have strong patent protection laws which gives a lot of benefits for the pharmaceutical companies. But, the patent

The twenty-first century has seen pharmaceutical companies grow in unprecedented size and strength. Due to the unprecedented growth the larger pharmaceutical companies have gained leverage and power in the prescription drug industry, but they lack innovation to market and they seek ways to help the business continue to increase its profits. The pharmaceutical industry was once ethically sound and was a valuable player in the development of human health. However, overtime with the lack of innovation pharmaceutical companies are becoming an unethical market that exploits patients, doctors and anyone else it can to increase its profitability. With eyes only on profitability this can create a hazard for patients because there

Extremely risky drug discovery and development, lengthening development times which increase development cost, return on investments, and generic competitors.

The Pharmaceutical industry has been in the spotlight for decades due to the fact that they have a reputation for being unethical in its marketing strategies. In The Washington Post Shannon Brownlee (2008) states, “We try never to forget that medicine is for the people. It is not for the profits. The profits follow.” This honorable statement is completely lost in today’s world of pharmaceutical marketing tactics. These tactics are often deceptive and biased. Big Pharma consistently forgets their moral purpose and focuses primarily on the almighty dollar. Big Pharma is working on restoring their reputation by reforming their ethical code of conduct.

Merck is one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world today. Although encountered with success, it still faces many problems today while trying to be the market leader competing against its competition. While being research and development driven company, Merck now has to go beyond R&D to stay competitive in the pharmaceutical industry. The main issue that seems to come up is that how far it can progress with the dual challenge of hitting peak annual financial performance while keeping the research pipeline full continued to weigh on senior management. Through the late 80s to early 90s, Merck was able to boast

Even though the pharmaceutical industry has made great improvements to human health and quality of life, like creating drugs for the treatment of AIDS, cancer, and other diseases, an increasing tension is growing between the public and the industry. These thoughts are fueled by issues such as drug pricing, affordable health care, and the battle against epidemic diseases in third world countries; social critics wonder whether this multi-billion dollar industry is giving enough back to the community and fulfilling its social responsibility.

The pharmacy business and healthcare in general is an immensely complex subject with profound ethical, economic and political intricacies and considerations. As discuss previously in this paper a lot of the issues with Shkreli arise from his own personality and a lack of moral turpi-tude. For the purpose of generating a reasonable solution we will put Shkreli’s personality aside and examine the specific strategy and conditions in the healthcare space that allowed Shkreli to single handedly raise the price of Daraprim by over 5000%. This section will examine the practice of trolling, a strategy used by Martin Shkreli and Turing pharmaceuticals to profit off the drug Daraprim despite adding nothing to the development or improvement of the drug.

Drug prices are set by pharmaceutical companies to cover research and development costs. While R&D costs clearly need to be covered, markets in developed countries already pay for most R&D of new products. Because of this, it makes moral and economical sense to establish a two-tiered pricing system; for R&D costs to be paid for by developed countries, allowing significantly reduced prices to be charged in developing countries.

Research and Development: Merck is a research-driven company that has a new research and development model incorporating its business strategy. Merck hopes to improve the success of is R&D and to reduce costs by focusing on therapeutic areas that have unmet medical needs, and scientific and commercial opportunity. It plans to develop products within these therapeutic areas that are highly valued by patients and doctors.

Merck was one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. • Merck was about to lose patent protection of two of its best selling drugs, which had been a significant part of their $2 billion annual sales. • Merck began putting millions of dollars into research (up to $1 billion) and within three years, Merck was able to discover four powerful medications. • Profits weren’t all that Merck cared about; Merck’s founder believed that “medicine is for people. It is not for the profits.” • He also believed that following the “medicine is for people” philosophy would lead to profits and had yet to fail.• River Blindness is caused by parasitic worms, which can be found in

Since its humble beginning as a small drugstore, Merck has placed a large amount of importance on improving the health and well-being of its customers. As drug patents expire and genetic forms of their top products become available, Merck’s strategy is to do the unexpected; instead of raising the price of their older products in favor of patent protected new drugs, Merck focuses on reducing their cost in order to better compete with their generic counterparts. Additionally, Merck’s plan for growth now encompasses a much more aggressive pursuit of new drugs in their pipeline through extensive research. Merck became the second largest health care company in the world after the merger with Schering-Plough in 2009 and has

Merck was established in 1891 to improve human and animal health through the development of innovative products. Merck currently has two reportable segments, the Pharmaceutical Segment and the Vaccines and Infectious Diseases Segment. Merck sells products through several channels including wholesalers, retailers, hospitals, clinics, government and managed health services providers. In the 1980’s the Merck was very successful in producing 10 major new drugs and had a very healthy pipeline. In later years, Merck has entered into joint ventures with many other pharmaceutical companies in order to expand its pipeline. In the last several years Merck has

Cipla should look to protect their patents on particular medications and explains why rules governing intellectual property rights in industrialized nations should not apply to poorer countries.