Pharmaceutical Executive-02-01-2006

While CMS officials praise the CED policy as a way to extend Medicare coverage, patients and industry fear the agency won't reimburse for innovative treatments unless sponsors support post-approval studies.

In The Small, Dusty, District Hospital In Temeke, Tanzania, head nurse Sarah Wilson Ochogo is carrying out her morning ritual. She drags a table outside the hospital's tuberculosis (TB) unit, sets out big, white, plastic bottles of pills, and opens a pencil-lined ledger that tracks her patients, their drugs, and their doses. By seven, more than 100 patients are lining up. They place their green patient cards under a stone near the table, and sit down on wooden benches to wait until Ochogo calls their name, gives them their medication, and watches while they take it. By a bit after nine, the patients are off to their daily routines-drawing water, tending crops, or just getting by the way people always have in Africa. And all of them, with luck, are one more day closer to curing their TB.

Is the public ready for an exciting thriller about terrorism, drug counterfeiting, valiant FDA agents, and glamorous women who invite pharma CEOs to come up and look at their drug patents? Sure. Maybe someone should write one.

Attacking articles in medical journals, those ghostwritten by professional medical writers paid by pharmaceutical companies, is the media's latest attempt to taint anything supported, promoted, or approved by Big Pharma.

Our co-promotions have helped us build a strong infrastructure in the US.

Pharma has an enormous backlog of drugs that never made it out of clinical trials. At Gene Logic, these discontinued drugs spell opportunity. Not only are they the foundation of a new business unit at Gene Logic, such failed compounds may become the cornerstone of a new approach to R&D as the industry confronts its latest productivity crisis.

Online strategies aren't monolithic; each must meet the particular goals of the brand in question, and serve the knowledge needs of a specific disease state. That said, experts agree on many of the fundamentals-the 5 "I"s of Internet marketing:

Corporate leaders' short-sighted focus on EPS and analyst expectations leaves the US workforce far behind its international counterparts when it comes to cultivating innovation. It's time we stepped up to the plate.

In Europe, seven of the top-10 injectible drugs are biologics. Generic versions could be priced 25 to 40 percent lower than prescriptions.

Educational initiatives geared toward women should allow them to interact, so they inspire and empower one another.

Since each consumer has unique preferences and online habits, marketers should leverage a variety of channels to capture a high volume of targeted consumer profile data, without jeapordizing the quality of their lists.

FDA's cautious approach to allowing drug manufacturers to communicate the economic value of drugs is contributing to an already poorly informed healthcare industry, and may be curtailing access to useful drugs.

The good news is that America's top newspapers were fairer to pharma in 2006. But coverage remains largely negative-and the hot topics are catching the industry by suprise.