Heads up pharmaceutical marketing firms: your branded “freebies” at US medical schools may be on their way out. An editorial in the current issue of Archives of Internal Medicine is calling for the new policies on interactions between pharma companies and physicians, even would-be medical professionals. The editorial highlights a study in that publication investigating whether medical students’ attitudes may be influenced by exposure to small branded items such as pens, clipboards, notepads, etc. That study involved 352 third and fourth-year students from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, which has a strict policy against promotional material, and the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, which does not. Read more »

Perhaps out of embarrassment at the stream of incidents involving contaminated products, the US Food and Drug Administration has requested the largest budget increase in its history. The agency intends to use part of the funds for its proposed Safer Medical Products initiative, which will scrutinize domestic and imported drugs. Will it use the money wisely? Read more »

Lundbeck Inc., the US subsidiary of the Danish pharmaceutical company H. Lundbeck A/S, launched this week ATryn (antithrombin recombinant), an anticoagulant used to prevent blood clots in patients with hereditary antithrombin deficiency, a rare blood-clotting disorder. Why is that noteworthy? ATryn is the first biologic product approved in the United States that is manufactured in a transgenic animal. Read more »

This morning, my colleagues and I were discussing the impact of blogs and online communities on the pharma industry. In a short time, much of the working world has gone from picking up a newspaper off their front stoop to pulling up the top-rated news sources online to scanning their favorite blogs and twitter messages. But we were wondering, in a patent-protected industry such as pharma, just how open can individuals be on the World Wide Web? Read more »

Swine flu hit my neighborhood this weekend. Three schools, including one about a mile from my home, are closed today. Developing a vaccine against the H1N1 virus have dominated industry discussions this past week and has been on the minds of many parents I know. It seems, too, that the rapid and efficient development of vaccines (not specific to any one virus) has been on FDA’s agenda as well, especially in terms of implementing the modern approach well known as its Critical Path Initiative. Read more »

As my colleague Maribel Rios discussed in her blog this week, the recent outbreak of swine flu gives us pause to consider our pandemic preparedness. The events of this past week also makes us more aware of the interrelationships and complexity of global public health, giving rise to an even broader question, has the pharmaceutical industry as a whole met its responsibility in effectuating global public health? Read more »