Viewed with hindsight, the story of flu antiviral drugs seems to be a classic story of “big pharma” greed. On the back of media hype and unfulfilled fears, a new medicine backed by only modest clinical data became a “blockbuster” generating billions of dollars for its producer. The reality is more nuanced, and the tale could easily instead have been a commercial and public health nightmare. The...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate attitudes regarding privacy of genomic data in a sample of patients with breast cancer. METHODS Female patients with breast cancer (n=100) completed a questionnaire assessing attitudes regarding concerns about privacy of genomic data. RESULTS Most patients (83%) indicated that genomic data should be protected. However, only 13% had significant concerns regarding privac...

BACKGROUND General practitioner (GP) prescribing accounts for about 10% of NHS expenditure. GPs at the top of the range have annual prescribing costs that are almost twice as much as those at the bottom of the range. This variation cannot be accounted for purely in terms of differences in underlying need for health care. OBJECTIVES To describe the relationship between GPs' prescribing costs a...

The pharmaceutical industry is one of the largest and most profitable industries in the world, and in the United States, the industry has a particularly privileged economic position. Yet the cost of drugs in the United States is higher than anywhere else, due largely to the fact that the industry is focusing increasingly on marketing rather than on the development of meaningful new medications:...

PETITE Study Report: Topical Corticosteroids Are Safe and Effective in the Long-term Treatment of Infantile Atopic Dermatitis It is well known that the presentation format of trial results, or the “frame,” strongly influences understanding, perceptions, and decisions and that the use of spin and selective reporting is a common strategy to achieve favorable conclusions. Most authors of the drug ...

Geoff Spurling and colleagues report findings of a systematic review looking at the relationship between exposure to promotional material from pharmaceutical companies and the quality, quantity, and cost of prescribing. They fail to find evidence of improvements in prescribing after exposure, and find some evidence of an association with higher prescribing frequency, higher costs, or lower pres...

The purpose of this study is to clarify the benefit and loss for the pharmaceutical companies when they adopt introducing pharmacogenomics in their clinical trials (in the following description, clinical trials by using pharmacogenomics is called "pgx clinical trial"), that is, when they use genetic information in their clinical trials. Particularly, the benefit for the pharmaceutical companies...

BACKGROUND Drug shortages and increasing generic drug prices are associated with low levels of competition. Mergers and acquisitions impact the level of competition. Record merger and acquisition activity was reported for the pharmaceutical sector in 2014/15, yet information on mergers and acquisitions in the generic drug sector are absent from the literature. This information is necessary to u...

on YouTube about using one of its products and the content prompts questions about off-label use, this would be a solicited request. The FDA may consider solicited requests evidence of a firm’s intent that a drug be used for off-label purposes. 2. The guidance also distinguishes between non-public and public unsolicited requests and recommends appropriate responses. For example, a telephone cal...

OBJECTIVE To determine whether financial ties to one drug company are associated with favourable results or conclusions in meta-analyses on antihypertensive drugs. DESIGN Retrospective cohort study. SETTING Meta-analyses published up to December 2004 that were not duplicates and evaluated the effects of antihypertensive drugs compared with any comparator on clinical end points in adults. Fi...