Category Archives: Guest Blog

Safety Trumps Access to Pain Meds for FDA

By Guest Blogger | Published: April 17, 2013
By Jill Wechsler, Washington Correspondent. The Food and Drug Administration has come down on the side of reducing abuse of opoid medications, over encouraging wider availability of low-cost painkiller meds. The agency decided to block generic versions of the original OxyContin formulation, which is fairly easy to manipulate by illegal users. The aim is to help [...]
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Budget Cutters Propose Big Hits on Pharma

By Guest Blogger | Published: April 17, 2013
By Jill Wechsler, Washington Correspondent. The Obama administration’s budget plan for fiscal year 2014 apparently assumes that the pharmaceutical industry can support Medicare and other health programs through changes in drug coverage and payments. It also relies on industry fees to keep the Food and Drug Administration up and running. Meanwhile, FDA and other public health [...]
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England's Cancer Drug Fund: An Acid Test for Value Based Pricing

By Guest Blogger | Published: April 12, 2013
By Leela Barham. England’s Cancer Drugs Fund (CDF) could be in its final financial year, after running in full since April 2011.  The fund covers the cost of cancer treatments either when NICE has said ‘no’, or hasn’t yet come to a view.  Companies can’t circumvent NICE though; if a company was invited to submit to [...]
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"Series A Crunch"? Some Suggestions

By Guest Blogger | Published: April 11, 2013
Recently, there has been an uptick in newsflow around the “series A crunch”/ “the valley of death” in regards to financing. Because of who we are (a firm that connects investors with private equity investments); we at Poliwogg see a lot of the “crunched” and “valley-dwellers.” We have some good news. The good news is [...]
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"Sunshine" Just the Tip of the Iceberg: Pharma and Full Disclosure

By Jill Wechsler | Published: April 10, 2013
“Sunshine” Just the Tip of the Iceberg: Full Disclosure for Pharma:??There seems no end to demands for data on clinical research, conflicts of interest, company payments, and drug prices, writes Jill Wechsler. Although recent legislation and regulations have greatly expanded the range of information that pharmaceutical companies have to unveil to the public, there’s an escalating [...]
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