Grassroots Marketing in a Global Era: More Lessons from BiDil

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 dru...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	The Journal of law, medicine & ethics medicine & ethics, 2011-03, Vol.39 (1), p.79-90
Main Authors:	Rusert, Britt M., Royal, Charmaine D. M.
Format:	Article
Language:	eng
Subjects:	Advocacy African Americans African Continental Ancestry Group Clinical trials Company marketing practices Drug approval Drug Combinations Drug Industry Drugs FDA approval Genomics Government regulation Grass roots Health aspects Health technology assessment Heart Failure - drug therapy History Humans Hydralazine - therapeutic use Isosorbide Dinitrate - therapeutic use Laws, regulations and rules Marketing Medicine Pharmacogenetics Prescription drugs Prescriptions R&D Research & development United States Food and drug administration
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Summary:	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.
ISSN:	1073-1105 1748-720X