Many studies have shown that pharmaceutical companies' funding of clinical trials is associated with pro-industry results. This article reviews the literature on that association, confirming its existence, and discusses its causes and potential responses. The mechanisms of industry influence are varied, more than is usually acknowledged. It is straightforward to identify a number of distinct ki...

OBJECTIVE To determine the informational content of nine pharmaceutical company websites about the antidepressant medication marketed by the company. METHOD A structured, explicit review of materials found on pharmaceutical company websites about nine antidepressants for which no generic drug is available was conducted using eight popular search engines. The accessibility of these websites wa...

We have implemented and evaluated a method to populate a company ontology, focusing on hierarchical relations such as acquisitions or subsidiaries. Our method searches for information about user-specified companies on the Internet using a search engine API (Google Custom Search API). From the resulted snippets we identify companies using machine learning and extract relations between them using...

OBJECTIVE To describe the sources of internal company documents used in public health and healthcare research. METHODS We searched PubMed and Embase for articles using internal company documents to address a research question about a health-related topic. Our primary interest was where authors obtained internal company documents for their research. We also extracted information on type of com...

Although some pharmaceutical company efforts to develop and distribute drugs in developing countries have been successful, many fall short of meeting needs in resource-poor nations. In the context of public-private partnerships, we discuss the concept of a nonprofit pharmaceutical company dedicated to developing and distributing drugs for diseases endemic in developing countries. Using the expe...

We describe the emerging issues related to warnings with respect to pharmaceutical company use of the internet as a vehicle for direct-to-consumer marketing (DTC) and market research. We describe the various techniques pharmaceutical companies have used to exploit this new communications medium which permits two way exchange of information. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not issued ...

Significant opportunities and challenges are presented when transitioning from managing laboratory automation development of pharmaceutical products at a single site to collaborative management with multiple domestic and international sites. Prior to integrating Glaxo and Burroughs Wellcome about two years ago, each company had expertise in laboratory automation, but neither had a strategy for ...