PHRMA

October 1, 2008
Disease is Non-Partisan
by Billy Tauzin

As Americans are poised to cast ballots that will bring to an end a truly historic Presidential campaign, it’s important to remember: Americans fighting disease don’t sign into the emergency room as Republicans or Democrats. They simply sign in as patients.
 
Disease is non-partisan.
 
While improving health care represents one of the most important challenges that our nation and its next President face, we must not lose sight of the various complementary elements that enable patients to bravely battle serious illnesses.
 
Over the past few years, I’ve been privileged to speak to audiences across the world – large and small gatherings all over the United States and around the globe – discussing America’s pharmaceutical research companies and their work to help patients live longer, healthier and more productive lives. Wherever I speak, I usually ask one question of nearly every audience: Have you or has someone you love ever faced a life-threatening illness?  Practically everyone I have asked that question raised their hand. And I, too, raised my hand.
 
There is an important reason that I want my audience to know that I also have been a patient. I was helped by an innovative medicine. The fact that I am alive today helps me illustrate the importance of living in a country that is home to the world’s most innovative pharmaceutical research sector.
 
I am alive today because of my family’s love, my faith in God, some great doctors and nurses, and because an innovative experimental medicine that helped me to beat the abdominal cancer that surely would have killed me.  
 
My doctors and nurses had done about all they could. I’d had surgery. But it didn’t get all of the cancer. I’d been treated with all kinds of different medicines with little improvement. My doctors told me that I had pretty much run out of choices. But they had one more medicine they wanted to try.  
 
I consulted with my doctors. I talked with my wife and family. We prayed over it. In the end, with practically nothing left to lose, we decided to give the new medicine a try.
 
I was fortunate. So much had to come together for me. But an important element of my recovery was that there was a new medicine available to treat me when I needed it most.
 
Unfortunately, that is not always the case. The hard reality is that too many patients every day struggle with debilitating – and even deadly – diseases with no good treatment or no cure.  They live in both fear and hope. Fear that they will not live long enough to see a treatment or cure. Hope that the nearly 500,000 men and women who work for America’s pharmaceutical research and biotechnology companies are zeroing in on an innovative medicine that will save them.
 
Their hope is well-placed. Today, pharmaceutical research and biotechnology companies are working on hundreds of new treatments for a wide range of diseases and conditions. More than 2,700 new medicines are in development for such conditions as cancer, diabetes, heart disease, HIV/AIDS, mental health and many rare diseases as well. Additionally, America’s pharmaceutical research companies are spurring new, innovative medical research and development, investing a record $58.8 billion last year alone.
 
Like millions of patients, I’ve benefited from the medicines created by America’s pharmaceutical research and biotechnology companies and their investment in innovative R&D and in patient health.  Fortunately, these companies are more committed than ever to finding new cures and treatments and to helping each patient’s hope become medical reality.
 
But it is also important to understand that progress is often slow, costly and uncertain. Not every medicine being researched and developed will make it all the way to medicine chests. In fact, only 1 out of every 5,000 to 10,000 compounds investigated by pharmaceutical researchers as a potential new medicine makes it all the way to approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for patient use.
 
That’s all the more incentive to keep boosting long-term investment in new R&D.
 
As I said, I was lucky. A dozen years before I needed the drug, the research and development of the medicine that helped save my life had already begun.   Thousands of dedicated men and women worked on it, each hoping that their work would result in a better treatment or even a cure for a deadly disease.  Better still, even though the odds were very much against success, they stuck with it and their discoveries benefited patients like me.





PhRMA President & CEO

Click here to read Billy's Bio

Read other Straight Talk from Billy Tauzin Articles
 

• 03.29.08   State of the Industry Address
  
• 02.21.07   Serving Patients our Central Mission
• 11.30.06   The Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit: Meeting the Needs of Seniors
• 05.02.06   A Research-based Pharmaceutical Sector Built to Meet The Challenges of the 21st Century

More