North Americans use half of the medicines sold in the world toaday, so naturally every major manufacturer wants a piece of that big (200 billion dollar) cake. To make it even more tempting consumers in the US gladly (I assume since four out of five prescriptions are requested by the patient) munch 70 % of the new drugs, where the most money is to be made. However, this cake is guarded by the FDA in all its glory.
Sometimes it might seem that it's easier for an American company to get a new drug passed, but that might be natural, if Americans are going to buy it the money might as well go back into american companies (though as a patient I'd probably want to put my money on the best medicine I could get and not just the most patriotic).
Thus it's not with the same amazement that seems to have struck many experts that I read about how AstraZeneca's new blod clot solver (or however I should translate it, I'm not into (or on) medicine myself) Exanta, got turned down by the FDA. Of course the reasons stated weren't plain "we want to protect our own market, so bugger off foreigner" (even if that's what they'd wanted to say they would probably have had to make it a bit longer, you just don't give a short reply to an application of over a million(!) pages), but the reasons they gave have been said to be in large part "incomprehensible" by people who should know what they're talking about (as, I again want to stress, I do not. I've read neither the application nor the reasons for it being rejected).
I'm glad I don't need this kind of medication, and if I did I'm glad I'm not in the US. There is a competitor in late stages of development by Bristol-Myers Squibb (with all the mergers going on I'm surprised there are any large companies with a short names left), but many studies are still needed before it has any chance of reaching the market. Until then the only alternative is Waran, with side-effects that cause a couple of hundred deaths each year in Sweden alone (so probably at least a couple of thousand in the US) while Exanta has (at least as far as has been possible to show in the testing) very few and no very serious side-effects.
I'm not saying this is a case of blatant protectionism, if it was obvious governments would be throwing pies and old vegetables at each other already, but it does seem a little strange.
So why did I write so long about this?... it just kind of caught my eye as stupid when I read the morning paper today.