All News

People tell you who they are, but we ignore it – because we want them to be who we want them to be. – Don Draper

Pharma, according to physicians currently embedded within Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs), is not living up to its potential. A survey conducted by Oliver Wyman has most of its 200 respondents saying the industry could play a more active role with value-based healthcare providers in helping to deliver better care at a lower cost, but it does not and probably won’t, by most expectations.

Last week, Canada’s National Prescription Drug Utilization Information System (NPDUIS), a federal-provincial fact-finding panel that works closely with the Patented Medicines Prices Review Board (PMPRB), issued its fourth New Drug Pipeline Monitor (NDPM) looking at drugs currently under development that may have an impact on future drug expenditures.

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.

Editorial Advisory Board member Les Funtleyder expands on his comments to the 2013 Pharm Exec Dealmakers Roundtable with some advice on how early stage companies can build their best case to accredited investors - get all your ducks in a row at once with good documentation and make foolproof trial design and implementation the center of your pitch.

There seems no end to demands for data on clinical research, conflicts of interest, company payments, and drug prices.

Improving brand adherence rates requires pharma marketers to have access to two growing bodies of knowledge. These are: 1) carefully evaluated evidence for what can improve brand revenue, and 2) informed forecasts of trends.

They write 92% of their prescriptions without consulting a physician and are often the first provider a patient sees, and yet nurse practitioners, physician’s assistants and other non-physician prescribers (NPPs) are still somehow overlooked by pharma as an opportunity to drive sales.

S

The conversation thread that binds this month's Pharm Exec is building communities-when the harsh economics of market change suddenly discounts the familiar, then the best way to move up is to reach out.

Do Big Pharma dollars make physicians lousy caregivers?

To read the March cover story in the PharmExec digital edition, click here.

As the US pharmaceutical industry anxiously watches the rapid onset of Obamacare, certainly one of the more pressing issues is the debate over the number of drugs that will be reimbursed in each therapeutic class under the Essential Health Benefits (EHB) program.

After less than a year on the job, the head of FDA’s Office of Generic Drugs (OGD) has announced his departure, a sign that all is not well with plans for major organizational changes at the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER).

Last week, the United States Center for Disease Control (CDC) and Britain’s Chief Medical Officer issued separate warnings about the urgent problem of antibiotic resistance in infectious diseases.

Last fall’s deadly meningitis outbreak linked to contaminated steroid injections is a tragic reminder of the risk of errors inherent in manual pharmacy medication compounding.

The greatly feared federal budget sequestration mandate went into effect March 1, and, initially, the impact was fairly muted.

Epigenetics is the study of changes in human gene expression, in particular from environmental factors. Pharma is also experiencing epigenetic change.

The Office of Prescription Drug Promotion (OPDP) is reorganizing its two primary advertising review divisions – professional and consumer – in an attempt to stay in line with the silo-breaking, multi-channel promotional output pouring in from pharma.

Finding the right people for the right job might seem an afterthought for big Pharma companies that have cut their US workforce by more than 250,000 in the past 10 years.

One of 2012’s biggest buzzwords was “Gamification” and that probably means that in 2013 there are a lot of people trying to sell you on the value of gamifying your pharma business.

If a patient or physician encounters pharma-created content that doesn’t pop with relevance or utility, it doesn’t matter how multitudinous the channels are that carry it.

Emerging country markets are widely viewed as Big Pharma’s ace in the hole to replace declining rates of innovation in the US and Europe,

Momentum is gathering in Brussels for real battles over carving up the 1 trillion dollars that the European Union has now agreed to spend between the end of this year and the end of the decade.

So, you’ve done it. You have left big business or forsaken the dusty halls of academia to launch that start-up of your own.

S

The rare disease advocacy community convened yesterday for its annual Rare Disease Day celebration, marking another year of advances in the fight against ailments once almost entirely ignored by big Pharma.

Kenneth Getz of the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development looks at leveraging pharmacists as a channel to raise clinical research literacy among patient communities.

Regulations concerning the contents of patient package inserts (known in the EU as “patient information leaflets” or PILs)

CBI’s 12th Annual Digital Innovation Forum, better known as iPharma, covered a broad range of topics from maintaining salient SEO strategy to effectively managing digital project pipelines across different departments.