Big Pharma: “For every dollar spent on research, nearly twice is spent on lobbying and marketing”

According to a recent article in The Guardian, for every dollar spent on research by the major pharmaceutical companies, nearly twice as much is spent on lobbying and marketing. This unfortunate reality is in sharp contrast to the almost daily struggle that academic researchers go through to secure funding for their work.

Industry has always played an important role in bringing new medically useful products to the public, but by industry’s nature its primary motivations are profit-driven and thus are not always in the public’s best interest. True, a pharmaceutical company is not a charity. The common argument is that they must necessarily recoup the cost of drug development, as only a small minority succeed in the marketplace.

On the other hand, taxpayer’s dollars in the form of National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants have been the life source of financial support for medical research that is directed toward serving the greater societal good. However, with government funding for medical research suffering a sharp decline, this is leaving a massive void for those academic researchers whose groundbreaking discoveries might never see the light of day, but for philanthropy.

The Lampidis Cancer Foundation is focused on filling one of those gaps by funding research that has shown huge potential for helping those suffering from cancer. Unfortunately, because the drug that is used in the research (the analog of glucose known as 2-DG), cannot be patented, little interest from industry has been forthcoming. That’s why your support is so vital to get this universal cancer treatment through the appropriate preclinical and clinical trials so that it can begin to provide hope and relief for millions of cancer sufferers worldwide.