Why does the reader care about a company called Amgen? If you start to ask about Amgen on the Internet, you’ll find news of the most cutting-edge advances in biotechnology and the leaps of his stock in the bags as new drugs get cheaper. If you're completely healthy.

Because if life has brought you as a gift an inflammatory disease (bowel, skin or bone), heart problems or malignant cancer... then you will surely meet Amgen and the multinationals that compete with him today. Today they are the so-called trending TOPIC in medicine and biological drugs created from genetic engineering, as well as the lists of those that make businesses more attractive on the stock exchanges.

PNV doctor Nerea Ahedo and two other PP and Citizens senators, who supposedly rejected the invitation of other parties, market in their Irish factory the great Amgen (sales of $23,000 million, 8,000 million profits, 20,000 employees), one of the main astronomers of biological drugs: arthritis, Crohn's disease or violent psoriasis disease. The brand-name molecule is called Etanercept, but many of the new drugs that affect the immune system end up with the particle -mab. Thus, Infliximab, Adalimumab, Rituximab and a long etcetera belong to the molecule Etanercept, especially in rheumatology and oncology, but are increasingly used in other serious diseases.

If 20 years ago these new biological drugs did not exist, their use has now become one of the dogmas of the medical establishment. There are few who dare to denounce the dangers of biological ones, who warn of the collateral damage of these genetic therapies and protest at the reduction of the control systems to the multinationals for their commercialization. Not many patients have the courage and the information to reject these violent treatments. Most of the information that your doctors have
about possible treatments for diseases is that distributed to them by multinationals, when it is not directly advertised, or that received by scientific research publications
companies related to the short chain.

However, the criticism of biologics has a serious economic component. El País acknowledged in 2015 that 40% of the total cost of
pharmaceutical spending by Spanish hospitals goes to biologics. Enough of France! the medium has called a rigorous analysis with the following title: “Those expensive medicines that cost us billions of euros to our Social Security and put
our health care system at risk.”

“We realise – writes Simon Gouin in the well-documented dossier – that these new anti-cancer drugs on the list are so expensive that they jeopardise the principle of solidarity that lies at the heart of our health system. But, in addition, the efficacy
of the easier drugs that doctors recommend has been questioned on many occasions. To put it mildly, it’s a dark pricing system that multinationals have, because they also have it trapped between experts and the pharmaceutical industry.”

Public expenditure, private benefits

Pay attention. The U.S. Institute of Medicine published in 2016 that there the one-year treatment per patient was costed with Etanercept, Adalimumab and Infliximab, between $24,859 and $26,460. In Spain it has been published that
these medicines cost between 10,000 and 14,000 euros a year, which indicates how pharmaceutical multinationals can vary prices. In any case, a great deal of money is being spent on the long-term involvement of millions of serious and chronic patients.

Although Big Pharma has so far been successful in selling its biologists at such a high price, arguing that the studies and clinical trials to produce them are very expensive, in recent years they have decided to make competition by marketing biosimilar remedies that we could somehow call biological low cost.

As Amgen acknowledges on his website, biosimilar or generic should not be mixed. A generic medicine sells the same brand reference molecule at a much cheaper price, as all citizens have seen. On the contrary, the biological
drugs that are now being copied at a lower price are much more complex in their composition and the biosimilars bear some of their components, which supposedly have to have an effect similar to the original. That is why it does not seem exaggerated to say that biological low cost are biosimilar.

What does this all have to do with the Members' journey? A lot. The research carried out by the Big Pharma companies on the drugs that they sell as expensive as a result of the neoliberal flood is, to a large extent, public money. The fruits of the money-research work of all citizens in public universities are subsequently launched by the brilliant start-ups that carry out the process until the launch of new molecules directly by the big
companies or by controlling them through the short rope.

On the other hand, the long phase of experimentation with new drugs is also carried out by the public health system. As in many other parts of the economy and public services, expenditures for the community, private benefits. More than one reader who has suffered from a serious chronic disease or cancer will witness how he has been offered to be an advanced essayist of the new leading drugs. Most of them create a privilege, someone will recognize the work of guinea pigs.

Precisely in this last section the role of politicians is included: Parliaments continue to regulate the big business of Big Pharma, so the new molecules that the industry is trying to market demand a loosening of the laws.

Although some medical critics report – as is obvious so far unsuccessful – that these expensive new drugs are marketed without guaranteeing patient safety, without demonstrating sufficient efficacy, without measuring collateral damage well and without comparing them with the potential benefits...

To this end, legislators have authorised the industry to summarise pre-marketing clinical trials and experiments. It looks like they're going to get the same thing now with biosimilars who say they're going to be almost equal to biologics.