Despite all the positive awareness-building campaigns run by generics companies all over the world, there still remains a persistent stigma amongst patients and even some doctors that generic medicines are in some way different or not as effective as the brand name originator products.

While we on the manufacturing side of the industry we deal day-to-day with producing generics that match as closely as possible the originator drug, the information gap at the consumer level is still large and til now statistical studies about the efficacy of generics have been scattered.

That’s why it was a great pleasure last week to read the findings of a meta-analysis study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association conducted by Dr. Aaron Kesselheim and colleagues of Harvard Medical School which sought to summarize clinical evidence comparing the efficacy of brand-name drugs and generics for treatment of heart and other cardiovascular conditions.

This new study combined the results of 30 studies done since 1984 comparing nine sub-classes of cardiovascular drugs to generic counterparts and concluded that brand-name drugs did not offer any advantage for patients’ clinical outcomes compared with generics.

It’s rather sad however that although the evidence does not support the notion that brand-name drugs are superior to generic drugs, amongst 43 editorials reviewed over half counsel against the interchangeability of generic drugs. This clearly shows that there is still a lot of information, image and awareness building left to be done.