Chemical & Engineering News, known for its coverage of research, business, the chemical industry, and related industries, is not known for 10,000-word stories looking at social issues. In the current issue, however, Lisa M. Jarvis tackles the orphan drug problem in...
Category: pharmaceutical industry
Chemical & Engineering News, known for its coverage of research, business, the chemical industry, and related industries, is not known for 10,000-word stories looking at social issues. In the current issue, however, Lisa M. Jarvis tackles the orphan drug problem in a long, comprehensive piece with a surprising turn: Orphan drugs, it seems, are no longer orphans. The headline on the piece is "Orphans Find a Home."
That's not true for all of them, but it's true for a growing number, as pharmaceutical and biotech companies, and investors, suddenly see that producing drugs for a disease that affects only a few thousand patients can be a potent money maker. This has not always been true, which is why orphan drugs were orphaned. Pharmaceutical companies were looking for drugs such as Lipitor that they could sell to millions of people. Now,...
It's always nice to see one of those pop-up messages that says a friend of yours has endorsed you on LinkedIn--for blogging, or editing, or journalism. One might trumpet one's own expertise, but plaudits from others carry more weight.
Pharmaceutical companies have evidently found that the be true as...
It's always nice to see one of those pop-up messages that says a friend of yours has endorsed you on LinkedIn--for blogging, or editing, or journalism. One might trumpet one's own expertise, but plaudits from others carry more weight.
Pharmaceutical companies have evidently found that the be true as well, because they have shown a fondness for getting outside experts to endorse their products. Sometimes they do it by writing articles extolling their products and persuading--or paying--an outside expert to sign on as the author. As the Forest Pharmaceuticals marketing plan for Lexapro put it, “Bylined articles will allow us to fold Lexapro’s message into articles about depression, anxiety, and comorbidity.”
That comes from a three-part series on medical-journal ghostwriting at ...
A chilling story by Peter Whoriskey in The Washington Post shows how...
A chilling story by Peter Whoriskey in The Washington Post shows how drug companies have misused their influence and their expertise to corrupt and distort research on new drugs. "Over the past decade, corporate interference has repeatedly muddled the nation’s drug science, sometimes with potentially lethal consequences," Whoriskey writes.
Much of what Whoriskey reports has been reported before, but he expertly weaves together reporting, analyses of publications, and the results of a Senate investigation into a devastating indictment of the drug industry.
He begins recounting the story of Avandia, a diabetes drug that GlaxoSmithKline claimed outperformed its competitors, according to a study published in the...
The productive collaboration between the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and MedPage Today has produced another strong story on conflicts...
The productive collaboration between the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and MedPage Today has produced another strong story on conflicts of interest in medicine.
The latest story comes out of a Senate investigation prompted in part by the Journal Sentinel's earlier stories by John Fauber, who wrote this one, too.
Here's the lede:
Medtronic marketing employees were secretly involved in drafting and editing favorable medical journal articles about the company's lucrative back surgery product while the company paid millions to the surgeons whose names lent weight to the studies, documents from a U.S. Senate investigation reveal.
Follow...
Here's a crackerjack case that hits all the important issues regarding the...
Here's a crackerjack case that hits all the important issues regarding the role of the FDA in regulating drugs: Gergana Koleva reports for Forbes that Regenerative Sciences is offering a stem-cell treatment for damaged joints that has not been approved by the FDA. The agency has sued the company, claiming that its treatment--in which stem-cells are derived from a patient's bone marrow and re-injected into damaged joints, according to Koleva--should be regulated under the rules for new drugs.
Koleva quotes from ...
Katherine Eban is one of those people who delights in spoiling your breakfast, as...
Katherine Eban is one of those people who delights in spoiling your breakfast, as she did mine this morning. It was a beautiful, sunny morning, I was enjoying my coffee--and then Eban struck.
Her weapon? A scorcher in this month's Self magazine, a place where science writers might not often look for enlightenment and inspiration. The hed and deck of Eban's piece sum it up nicely:
The Hidden Dangers of Outsourcing Radiology
That scan of your brain, bones, or breasts you got last Tuesday? It might have been read by someone who isn't a doctor and...
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