Merck & Crixivan

1298 Words6 Pages
Merck and Co., Inc. is a leading pharmaceutical company that is facing a dilemma about distribution and marketing of its novel anti-HIV drug. After research efforts of four hundred people and over $700 million (1996 Dollars), for a period of ten years, Merck was able to market a novel anti-HIV drug Crixivan that was classified under the class of protease inhibitors. 1 Undue prevalence of AIDS in the US had triggered a huge demand for the drug even before the drug was in the FDA approval stage. An “unparalleled and complex synthesis procedure” 1 resulted in a delayed large-scale production plan of Crixivan. Approximately fifty patients required a dose of almost one hundred pounds of this drug, this demand could only be fulfilled over a period of one year with the current manufacturing infrastructure available at Merck. Merck Inc. also posed bottlenecks during the drug development process in form of corporate pressure from the government and AIDS activists. Since Crixivan was one of the most efficient and safe drug in the list of anti-HIV drugs, an emotional pressure from the public health officials and AIDS activists began to mount barriers in the Drug development process of Crixivan. There were multiple aspects that Merck Inc. had to look into before entering the production of the drug. As a precautionary measure Merck had learnt from the bad experience between the AIDS activists and Burroughs Wellcome’s anti-HIV drug AZT pricing and distribution. The AIDS activist’s commitment led some of them to manufacture the drug on their own.1 Impatient activists demanded Crixivan to be available sooner in a “compassionate use”, which was given only in cases of very advanced stages of disease that had very few treatment left.1 Since the treatment of advanced stages of AIDS would have lead to inferior quality of clinical trial data, the drug company was reluctant in
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