Could Social Networking Save Big Pharma? - Herper - The Medicine Show - Forbes

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Could Social Networking Save Big Pharma?

Jan. 23 2011 - 12:57 pm | â 747 viewsâ  | â 0 recommendationsâ  | â 1

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Conversations about Facebook, Twitter, and drug companies tend to focus on the

Food and Drug Administration’s snail-speed attempts to come up with

regulations for medical marketing on social media sites. But Shaywitz and

Mathai Mammen, two employees at the San Francisco-based biotech Theravance,

suggest using social medial for an entirely different purpose — research and

development — in an Op-Ed in the Boston Globe. Their views don’t represent

those of their company.

Half a century ago, astute clinicians noticed that patients receiving the new

anti-tuberculosis drug iproniazid experienced an enhanced sense of well-being, a

chance observation that led directly to the development of antidepressants and

the birth of psychopharmacology. More recently, an unexpected side effect

reported by patients in a clinical trial of a drug for chest pain led to the

development of Viagra.

These stories of medical discovery may not be so unusual. The idea of using a

leukemia drug for stomach cancer, an anti-seizure drug for nerve pain, a cancer

drug for gout — all were impactful suggestions proposed by physicians or

researchers outside the company developing the drug.

In the age of Facebook and Google, it seems there should be a better, more

systematic way of harnessing this communal wisdom and cultivating this sort of

medical discovery. Enter open innovation.

via The next killer app – The Boston Globe.

What they are suggesting is a social networking site — perhaps it could be run

by a consortium of drug companies such as Pfizer, & , and Amgen.

Doctors would log on to report findings, and those results could guide how drugs

were tested. This is not an entirely new idea. Friend, the president of

Sage Bionetworks and the former head of cancer research at Merck, has suggested

pooling patient reported data about drugs in a similar manner. But this is one

way of producing data that might be much better at tracking the information

about what happens in the normal, daily course of prescribing medicines than

anything that we have right now. Go read the article.

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