Greedy and criminal: Big Pharma markets deadly and ineffective cancer drugs

Medical experts are saying that the biggest flaw of Big Pharma today is a high percentage of ineffective products being sold without previous clinical trials. This is particularly true when anti-cancer medications are concerned.The sad fact is that Big Pharma prefers to invest in advertising and bribing officials instead of attempting to make their products truly effective. Today pharmaceutical manufacturing is handsomely funded by politicians and organized crime, since it's has become one of the most efficient money laundering schemes and has already corrupted a large number of US and EU officials.

Biotech expert C. Glenn Begley, the former Vice-President and Global Head of Hematology and Oncology Research at Amgen - one of the largest cancer research centers in the US, is now a senior vice president in a private biotech company TetraLogic. In his article published in Nature magazine back in March 2012, Glenn stated that a series of tests conducted under his supervision proved that out of 53 anti-cancer drugs that had been developed by "respected laboratories," a total of 47 showed no noticeable improvements in patients' health conditions (which amounts to 88%).

Unfortunately, this study was proven right by a number of research teams that arrived at similar results while running tests. In 2009, a group of researchers at Michigan State University reached a similar conclusion, just like Bayer's research team. At the same time certain research institutes, like the famous Harvard Medical School, prefer to falsify their studies. In Harvard's case it received a hefty grant of 15 million dollars from the Federal government.

Big Parma is all about PR campaigns and advertisements, while putting new potentially dangerous drugs on the market. For example, Glivec and Sutent that are authorized for usage in Europe, are reducing the size of tumors by wiping out pericytes that prevent the growth of tumor-nourishing blood vessels. As a result, additional testings showed, these drugs force cancer to spread faster across a body, making it increasingly more deadly.

Canadian Professor at the Department of Pharmacology at Dalhousie University, George S. Robertson is also stressing the ineffectiveness of certain drugs that are being put on the market today.

Over the past two decades, the most promising drugs that should have allowed people to fight cancer effectively were Gleevec and Herceptin. However, as it has been recently discovered, each of these medications initiated genetic mutations of cells, by turning a regular one into a malignant cell.

Scientists from Bayer had little luck with their studies as well. In 2011, in a paper "Believe it or not", Bayer admitted that researchers couldn't get the same results in clinical trials on stage two of their testings. The head of Target Discovery at Bayer Schering Pharma admitted that research teams couldn't replicate the initial results of most of Bayer's studies, no matter how hard they tried. Out of 47 potential new anti-cancer drugs less than one-quarter got past stage two. The scandal that followed put an end to all anti-cancer studies at Bayer.

According to C. Glenn Begley, when investigating Amgen Inc, approximately 100 scientists could not confirm the official results of clinical trials they contacted the producers of these drugs. Some of them demanded that Amgen Inc should sign a non-disclosure agreement in order to keep these facts from being published.

In pursuit of federal grants Big Pharma is falsifying research, by paying for factless publications in scientific journals, which then opens a direct path to the introduction of new drugs on the market, regardless of their potential danger. Unfortunately, regular people across the globe are to pay for this deceit, more often than not with their own lives.