Pharmaceutical Executive-09-01-2001

As policy makers struggle to devise a pharmacy benefit for Medicare patients, pressure mounts to impose spending limits on medications. In turn, consumer activists are challenging industry’s longtime claim that price controls will reduce investment in R&D for life-saving therapies.

In religion, belief comes first. In science, it comes last. And in politics, as in publishing, you can often find it for sale.

London-Schering and Biogen have both expressed anger over the leak of a National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE) document suggesting that doctors stop prescribing beta-interferon to new multiple sclerosis (MS) patients.

London-Following a review of its own drug discovery capabilities, GlaxoSmithKline practically gave away its majority stake in Affymax to a group of venture capitalists led by Patricof.

Geneva-The usually quiet International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Associations (IFPMA) leapt to Pfizer’s defense after Oxfam International criticized the US company about access to medicines in the developing world.

For the past 20 years, the blockbuster model has dominated the pharmaceutical industry. It has generated tremendous value for companies and shareholders and will likely continue to do so well into the future. That business design matched Big Pharma's expansive product development and marketing investments with the ample supply of opportunities for benefiting large patient populations and allowed an unusually large number of players to succeed in the high-stakes game. Not all companies can continue to win that game, however, so new fields of competition will be needed.

Berlin-The German healthcare system is ailing, and politicians are too timid and inefficient to do anything about it, according to the Verband Forschender Arzneimittelhersteller (VFA), Germany’s pharmaceutical industry trade association.

European Union-Both prescription and over-the-counter (OTC) industry sectors have welcomed the long-awaited proposals to overhaul EU pharma legislation.

If only two words could be used to describe Big Pharma's promotional spend trends during the past 12 months, they would be "it depends." Budgets are simply tools and the industry uses them as such: to determine just the right spend, on a certain type of product, during a particular phase of its life cycle.

The unprecedented proliferation of new digital and traditional media vehicles is surpassed only by the continued growth of pharma marketing budgets and promotional spending. The combination of the two has generated an industry stir-among product managers, their agency partners, and publishers-about what constitutes the optimal media mix for today's pharma brands.