We read a lot of critiques of the pharma industry, and frankly many of them leave a lot to be desired in terms of logic, clarity, and thoughtfulness.
For an example of the opposite—a truly clear and scorching attack, let us recommend to you a document prepared by Dr. Joseph Glenmullen, a Clinical Instructor in Psychiatry [...]

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Don’t miss the current issue of Fast Company magazine, which features a look at a fascinating new program at Pfizer. It seems that in the wake of the company’s deep layoffs, Jordan Cohen, senior director of organizational effectiveness, started looking at what executives were doing and discovered that lots of it consisted of menial tasks—researching, [...]

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The follow-up to this week’s Vytorin flap has taken an ominous twist. And I’m not just thinking of threatened investigations and lawsuits. A handful of relatively prestigious publications have moved past criticizing Vytorin, Merck, and Schering-Plough and have begun to ask uncomfortable questions about statins in general and the whole idea of lowering cholesterol. In [...]

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European news sources are reporting that European Union officials conducted surprise dawn raids Wednesday at the offices of a number of pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi-Aventis, AstraZeneca, Merck Sharp & Dohme, Johnson & Johnson’s Belgian unit, Wyeth, and Novartis’ Sandoz division.
What’s the beef? Reports say the EU is looking for evidence of [...]

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We didn’t get to travel to this year’s JPMorgan Healthcare Conference, but Pharm Exec contributor Audrey S. Erbes (founder of Erbes & Associates) did. Here are her impressions:
There was a lack of usual excitement among drug companies but no sense of distress.
Although this year’s event broke attendance records with more than 7,700 participants and 331 [...]

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STATS, the statistics-based media watchdog, has published its annual Dubious Data Awards, flagging the year’s worst science stories. It is, as usual, an impressive list: There’s the tale of the San Francisco mayor, who banned city agencies from buying water in plastic bottles, partly because they’re made of a chemical that sounds a lot like [...]

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The award for goofiest attack on the FDA this week has to go to Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), who has asked the Congressional Research Service to look into the possibility of changing or eliminating FDA’s Fast Track designation, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
The Plain Dealer no doubt thinks this makes sense. Last December, the [...]

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The codgers out there probably remember Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, one of the ultimate documents of ’60s-era hippiedom. The catalog, which first appeared in 1968, was a sort of pre-electronic World Wide Web devoted to organic farming, composting toilets, handicrafts, solar power, and other topics of interest to the do-it-yourself, back-to-the-land [...]

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By now you’ve probably read news accounts of a study in the American Journal of Public Health that found that rich people are more likely than poor to receive free samples of prescription drugs. If you actually read the numbers though, it turns out that things aren’t quite as simple as the headlines suggest.
The study [...]

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A key legal issue for pharma these days is whether FDA approval preempts liability lawsuits at the state level. Three cases are wending their way toward the Supreme Court, of which the most important is arguably Wyeth v. Levine, a suit concerning Wyeth’s antinausea med, Phenergan (promethazine). Over the holidays, the Solicitor General released an [...]

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