Blood Feud (2011)

by Kathleen Sharp.
Book Review on Center for Medical Consumers web site.
While this is a recurring theme, Blood Feud tells a story we all need to be reminded of. Big PhRMA is about profit not patient good. The point is: caveat emptor. The public is at risk when drug companies fight for market share.

An African proverb holds that "when elephants fight, it's the grass that suffers." This is underscored by the struggles of PhRMA giants Amgen and Ortho-Johnson and Johnson to capture the market share of Epogen and Procrit.

Blood Feud is a sobering story. A similar tale was told in "Pain Killer: A Wonder Drug's Trail of Addiction and Death" (2003) by Barry Meier that deals with Oxycontin.

This book is a thorough expose of many of the dirty tricks played by PhRMA as it pursues is goals of profit over patients' well-being. No one is allowed to stand in PhRMA's way..

The Cure

by Geeta Ananda

From Amazon: "At 15 months old, Megan Crowley was diagnosed with Pompe disease, a rare genetic disorder that was likely to reduce her life span to five years at most. Her five-month-old brother, Patrick, shared the same disease and its crippling progression. Their father, John Crowley, a freshly minted Harvard MBA graduate, was determined to use his brains and connections to find a cure. He started a family foundation to fund research on Pompe disease and eventually headed a biomedical start-up company with a promising approach. Ironically, the more involved he got in efforts to find a cure, the slimmer the prospects were for his own children as hard business decisions and conflict-of-interest questions thwarted his efforts. Blocked from getting his children into clinical trials that could prolong their lives, and watching them grow weaker and weaker, Crowley concedes that he was occasionally tempted to simply steal the precious drugs. But he pressed ahead. Anand, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter with the Wall Street Journal, delivers a detailed and heart-wrenching account of a father's extraordinary efforts to save his children and find a cure for a debilitating and life-threatening disease."Vanessa Bush
The movie "Extraordinary Measures" is based on this book.