Reflector

New EU group could ultimately end up handcuffing much-needed efforts to modernize drug authorization.

New competition commissioner steps into the unenviable role of trying to solve two particularly contentious pharma firestorms.

Brussels correspondent Reflector asks, what attitude will the new EC for competition, Margrethe Vestager, adopt to the pharmaceutical industry?

Only a year ago, hopes were high of rapid progress towards a transatlantic trade deal that would boost the European and US economies - and ease conditions for drug firms on both sides of the ocean.

It’s difficult to open an email or an envelope in Brussels these days without yet another agenda falling out of it, carrying the promise of a new start.

While action is heating up at the international level to tackle counterfeit drugs, Europe is making its own efforts to stop fake medicines from entering the legal supply chain.

Any complacency that the world of healthcare might be feeling about advances in the ability to treat patients suffered a head-on assault in Dublin, Ireland, last week, at a conference organized under the auspices of the Irish Presidency of the European Union and featuring a galaxy of Irish and European stars from the worlds of politics, regulation, research, industry and patients.

The plan to accelerate generic pricing and reimbursement has become another tragic European casualty, writes Brussels correspondent Reflector.

Pharm Exec’s EU correspondent, Reflector, looks at some of the European regulatory developments earmarked for 2014 and anticipates their effect on the industry.

The European Medicines Agency’s ambitions are huge - as befits a body with such huge responsibilities. But its capacities to achieve what it sets out to do are now falling ever shorter.

The data-transparency bandwagon is rolling rapidly across Europe, energetically propelled by regulators, health campaigners, and generic manufacturers.

The shockwaves from the current European Union debates in Brussels on medical devices are likely to echo through the medicines business over the next few years.

As the process to create the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (T-TIP) gets underway, Reflector asks, what is the likelihood of drug firms - and patients - reaping any rewards from the negotiations?

The ink is not yet dry on the European Union’s Horizon 2020 agreement to invest some €70 billion ($92 bn) in research over the next seven years, and already contenders for funding are jostling for attention.

Tensions are rising in Europe’s pharmaceutical sector as crunch-time approaches for the legislation to combat counterfeits. By this time next year, the European Commission is due to have decided on the mechanisms required to put into effect the European Union’s hugely complex new rules to keep falsified medicines out of the legal supply chain. The manufacturing industry will have to carry the cost of much of the chosen system - and there is wide disagreement about what sort of system should be introduced, and who should pay for it.

A just-published report from the European taskforce trying to help Greece crawl out of its crisis makes clear just how significant a role health reform is supposed to play in restoring health to the economy.