Derek Lowe's commentary on drug discovery and the pharma industry. An editorially independent blog from the publishers of Science Translational Medicine. All content is Derek’s own, and he does not in any way speak for his employer.
If you work in the drug industry, and for some reason you feel that your blood pressure isn’t quite high enough today, a look at this debate at the British Medical Journal should fix that up for you. “Should journals stop publishing research funded by the drug industry?” is the title – there, doesn’t that… Read More
This is exactly the kind of headline the drug industry does not need. Via FierceBiotech, here’s a story in The Guardian on the recent efforts to get companies to disclose more about the clinical trial results for investigational drugs. GSK is the company that seems to have done the most in this regard, but the… Read More
FiercePharma has some good figures to back up my posts the other day on R&D spending versus marketing. I mentioned how many people, when they argue that drug companies spend more on marketing than they do on research, are taking the entire SG&A number, and how companies tend to not even break out their marketing… Read More
“Can you respond to this tripe?” asked one of the emails that sent along this article in The Atlantic. I responded that I was planning to, but that things were made more complicated by my being extensively quoted in said tripe. Anyway, here goes. The article, by Brian Till of the New America Foundation, seems… Read More
Vytorin’s been discussed several times around here. The combination of Zetia (ezetimibe), the cholesterol absorption inhibitor discovered at Schering-Plough, with Merck’s simvastatin looked as if it should be a very effective cholesterol-lowering medication, but the real-world data have been consistentlypuzzling. There’s a big tri… Read More
There’s been a lot of rumbling recently about the price of new cancer drugs (see this article for a very typical reaction). It’s a topic that’s come up around here many times, as would be only natural – scrolling back in this category will turn up a whole list of posts. I see that Bernard… Read More
John LaMattina takes off after PhRMA’s effectiveness here at Forbes. His two points are release of clinical trial data and openness about consultant payments to physicians. And I agree with him on both of those – as I’ve said here many times, we’re not going to regain anyone’s trust until we stop giving people reasons… Read More
John LaMattina (ex-head of Pfizer’s global R&D) has a new book out about the industry, called Devalued and Distrusted. He tells Pharmalot that he got the idea to write a sequel to his earlier book, Drug Truths, when he appeared on the “Dr. Oz” show: . . .and out of the blue last year, I… Read More
John LaMattina takes on Marcia Angell and her recent interview. It sounds like he made it farther into the podcast than I could: “The drug companies do almost no innovation nowadays….. All they have to do is the late development. And that’s the clinical trials. Now that is an expensive part of the process. But… Read More
You’ll have seen the headlines about off-label promotion of drugs by pharma companies. No, not the ones that decry it as a shady marketing technique, punishable by huge fines. I mean the ones about how a federal court has ruled that it’s completely legal. This came as a surprise, at least to me. The U. Read More
