A senior executive with Britain's biggest drugs company has admitted that most prescription medicines do not work on most people who take them.
Allen Roses, worldwide vice-president of genetics at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), said fewer than half of the patients prescribed some of the most expensive drugs actually derived any benefit from them.
Speaking to a conference in London, Dr Roses referred to another study carried out by Brian Spear, a senior scientist at the US company Abbott Laboratories, on the efficacy rates of a range of different drugs.
Drugs for Alzheimer's disease work in fewer than one in three patients, whereas those for cancer are only effective in a quarter of patients. Drugs for migraines, for osteoporosis, and arthritis work in about half the patients, Dr Roses said. Most drugs work in fewer than one in two patients mainly because the recipients carry genes that interfere in some way with the medicine, he said.
Dr Roses believes that genetics are the basis for determining whether patients will respond to a medicine and for vulnerability to side-effects.

Source: http://www.epha.org/a/957