Novartis

The Novartis part of the trip was really my favorite because it presented a different side of medicine that is sometimes really quite lost in modern Europe due to the popularity for homeopathy medicines and other alternative medications.

We started off the morning with an overview of what it takes to make a drug. The part that really struck me was just how much money it costs to produce one drug, about 100 million euros in veterinary medicine. That is a lot of money when you think that the average Rimadyl bottle on the internet costs about 15 euros. The economics of veterinary medicine are in general much tighter than in human medicine, meaning that sometimes veterinarians just don’t have the drugs that we need in order to do our job.

For example, we learned this year in pharmacology class that our insulin drugs were taken off the market because the drug companies just cant make enough money if the drugs are only sold to veterinarians and don’t make it into the human market as well. This is now causing a bit of a crisis within the veterinary world because at the same time that obesity in cats and dogs is increasing we have just lost our best medications! I really appreciated meeting the people that work hard in order to make the medications to us that enable veterinarians to do their job.