Grassroots Marketing in a Global Era: More Lessons from BiDil

Posted in Articles, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2012-03-24 02:07Z by Steven

Grassroots Marketing in a Global Era: More Lessons from BiDil

The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics
Volume 39, Issue 1, Spring 2011
pages 79–90
DOI: 10.1111/j.1748-720X.2011.00552.x

Britt M. Rusert, External Humanities Fellow
Center for the Humanities
Temple University

Charmaine D. M. Royal, Associate Research Professor
Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy; Department of African and African American Studies
Duke University

BiDil, a heart failure drug for African Americans, emerged five years ago as the first FDA approved drug targeted at a specific racial group. While critical scholarship and the popular media have meticulously detailed the history of BiDil from its inauspicious beginnings as a generic combination drug for the general population to its dramatic resuscitation as a racial medicine, the enthusiastic support shown by some African American interest groups has been too little understood, as has their argument that BiDil was an important response to race-based health disparities. In this essay, we show how the drugmaker, NitroMed, used the support it had solicited from black advocacy groups and community members to market BiDil as a unique “grassroots” pharmaceutical to the African American community. We go on to situate BiDil, which relied on a domestic, U.S.-centered conception of race, within the context of the global nature of both race and health disparities. Ironically, the grassroots angle of the BiDil case ultimately obscured the global crisis in health disparities. Furthermore, we argue that the grassroots model initiated by NitroMed should be taken note of, as it marks a potential avenue for the marketing of other drugs in the future.

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Is Race-Based Medicine Good for Us?: African American Approaches to Race, Biomedicine, and Equality

Posted in Articles, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2012-03-24 01:39Z by Steven

Is Race-Based Medicine Good for Us?: African American Approaches to Race, Biomedicine, and Equality

The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics
Volume 36, Issue 3, September 2008
pages 537–545
DOI: 10.1111/j.1748-720X.2008.302.x

Dorothy Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology; Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
University of Pennsylvania

This article presents a preliminary framework for exploring the intersection of science and racial politics in the public debate about race-based pharmaceuticals, especially among African Americans. It examines the influence of three political approaches to race consciousness on evaluations of racial medicine and offers an alternative critique.

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