The pharmaceutical company Pfizer has acquired the Global Blood Therapeutics group for just over $5 billion. The latter succeeded in designing a new treatment for sickle cell disease.
Jenny Hypocrate, president of the Association for Information and Prevention of Sickle Cell Disease, believes that this is good news:
“The fact that Pfizer is buying Global Blood Therapeutics will help us because it is one of the biggest laboratories in the world. So there will be no pharmaceutical lobbying to make a double drug. We will just have this drug which reduces the frequency of seizures. A good thing for the patients who, all the same, represent 20 million people concerned, i.e. 100,000 patients in the United States and 30,000 patients in France. That is approximately 30,000 patients in France. We are satisfied because it will allow us to give greater visibility to sickle cell disease and, of course, to research for people with sickle cell disease.”
However, Jenny Hypocrate mentions the difficulties encountered by patients in France to obtain treatment for sickle cell disease:
“We already had problems with this drug because it had obtained marketing authorization in France and Europe, but France backtracked by saying that we might no longer have this drug if we did not didn’t have a pair. This pair is chemotherapy, with which some patients had already failed treatment. So they wanted to reintegrate this drug into this chemotherapy with the new drug. We didn’t accept that at the association, so we We sent a letter to the Ministry of Health, the High Authority for Health and the President of the Republic to denounce this kind of behavior. It is not normal that a country can accept and then refuse.
