Policy Forum I n the late 1950s, the late Democratic Senator Estes Kefauver, Chairman of the United States Senate's AntiTrust and Monopoly Subcommittee, put together the first extensive indictment against the business workings of the pharmaceutical industry. He laid three charges at the door of the industry: (1) Patents sustained predatory prices and excessive margins; (2) Costs and prices were...

We explore unsupervised and supervised whole-document approaches to English NEL with naı̈ve and context clustering. Our best system uses unsupervised entity linking and naı̈ve clustering and scores 66.5% B+ F1 score. Our KB clustering score is competitive with the top systems at 65.6%.

BACKGROUND Phase III clinical trials and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulatory decisions are critical for success of new drugs and can influence a company's market valuation. Knowledge of trial results before they are made public (ie, "inside information") can affect the price of a drug company's stock. We examined the stock prices of companies before and after public announcements rega...

In November 2002, the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), Africa’s major free trade bloc, applied to the World Trade Organization (WTO) for the right to manufacture low-cost drugs to treat AIDS. The Secretary General of the Organization Erastus Mwencha, in announcing this move, said that drugs must be cheaper as the world could not continue to see people dying for the sake o...

High drug prices are a major barrier to patients' access to drugs and compliance with treatment. Yet low drug prices are often argued to provide inadequate incentives for innovation. We propose a drug-licensing model for health care, which has the promise of increasing drug use without altering patients' out-of-pocket spending, health plans' costs, or drug companies' profits. In such a model, p...

BACKGROUND A topic of great concern in bioethics is the medical research conducted in poor countries sponsored by wealthy nations. Western drug companies increasingly view Latin America as a proper place for clinical research trials. The region combines a large population, modern medical facilities, and low per capita incomes. Participants from developing countries may have little or non altern...

In 1987, a group infection of hepatitis in patients receiving a contaminated fibrinogen product was first reported to the Japanese regulatory agency. Eventually, this serious drug incident involved more than 10,000 cases of infection. In response, the Government of Japan established a responding inspection committee in 2008 to make recommendations for the restructuring of drug regulatory admini...

Pharmaceutical companies provide the majority of financial support for staging the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) Annual Scientific Assembly. In return they are allowed to dominate the physical and mental environment. The assembly is opulent and entertaining, but undoubtedly much of the expense is passed to the health care consumer in the form of high-priced brand-name prescriptio...