It is time to stop hiding our heads in the sand when it comes to interactions with the pharmaceutical industry! This is an issue of reality, not ideology. In an ideal world there would be no industry sponsored research and no potential for tainted research. In an ideal world there would be no need for marketing of new drugs to physicians or to the public and all the savings would be passed on t...

The total global pharmaceutical market was estimated at around US $343 billion (bn) in 1999 and registered a 10% growth in 1999 compared to 6-7% p.a. in the past three years. The industry is characterised by high fragmentation with the top ten companies accounting for only around 36% of the prescription pharmaceutical market in 1998. However, consolidation in the industry has resulted in an inc...

The pharmaceutical industry is accountable on the one hand to its shareholders and on the other to the community at large. These two obligations can, in principle, be met. However, the industry has developed practices that do not consider society, including excessive or inappropriate pricing of drugs, an indifference to the needs and limitations of the developing world, an imbalance between tru...

One privilege of working in the health service today is the enormous range of effective therapies available to us. Advances in surgical techniques, tools, and materials have been more than matched by the vast number of pharmaceutical products addressing an ever wider range of conditions. Even for conditions where treatments have been available for many years, newer agents may be more potent, ha...

In today’s competitive world, there are several strategies to deal with the fast changing environment, among which New product development (NPD) is a common strategy. However, almost half of the resources that companies devote to NPD are spent on products that may fail. This issue is particularly highlighted in the pharmaceutical industry mainly because of a long development-time, low success r...

Medication is known as the main and the most effective factor in improving public health. On the other hand, having a strong and effective pharmaceutical industry will, to a very large extent, guarantee people's health. Therefore, this study was prospected to review the different pharmaceutical industries around the world and propose a model for the context of Iran. This is a qualitative as wel...

Virtually all new drugs are introduced, evaluated, and marketed under the control of the pharmaceutical industry and general supervision of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The clinical investigator must look to the pharmaceutical industry for support of studies of drugs, and the industry, in turn, needs the investigator to evaluate agents before FDA approval and to present findings in t...

This paper seeks to provide an economic perspective on the pharmaceutical industry, which has come under increasing criticism on a number of issues. In the main, that criticism amounts to a rather ineffective flailing at the supply side of the market for pharmaceutical products-much of it based on inaccurate perceptions-when a more productive policy would be to strengthen the hitherto weak and ...

Development of an immunotoxicology program within the pharmaceutical industry is described. With few guidelines in the area and a multitude of factors to consider, a basic screen for evaluating immune competence in species routinely used in toxicologic studies has been proposed. The future of immunotoxicology depends upon the ability of the selected immune function tests to be predictive of hum...

Offshoring has been adopted as a tool for reducing costs and for gaining strategic advantages by financial services, software development, and other competitive industries. For a variety of reasons, the pharmaceutical industry has been slow to take advantage of the benefits that offshoring can provide. The purpose of this article is to explore the internal and exogenous factors motivating globa...