Author: Lynne Taylor

Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Barack Obama has lent his support to concerns over seriously-ill patients, after it emerged this week that US insurers are increasingly charging members being treated with the most expensive drugs a percentage of the costs of these medications, instead of the standard set copayment.

Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, president of the Philippines, has thrown out a controversial “generics-only” provision which is continuing to delay Congressional approval of the Cheaper Medicines Bill.

Television advertising is no longer the standard for direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising of prescription medicines to US consumers, and as drugmakers’ DTC budgets continue to shrink, companies are looking more at emerging and targeted approaches, such as e-mail, websites and programmes in physician offices and pharmacies, including patient education events, rebates/coupons and product placement, according to a new survey from Cegedim Dendrite.

The UK Court of Appeal in London has begun hearing the appeal brought by drugmaker Eisai against a ruling in 2007’s High Court judicial review of the process by which the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) reached its decision that anti-dementia medicines should not be prescribed for National Health Service (NHS) patients with newly-diagnosed mild Alzheimer’s disease (AD).

India’s long-awaited National Pharmaceutical Policy has now been drafted, and it focuses both on the affordability of essential medicines and measures to grow the domestic industry, the Minister for Chemicals and Fertilizers, Ram Vilas Paswan, has announced.