Pfizer

See the following -

"Industry Will Not Support Open-Ended Science, So Govt Must"

Aradhna Wal | CNN-News18 | December 20, 2016

On December 11, News18 exposed how India’s clinical trials and drug discovery process is skewed towards diseases like cancer while ignoring the top killers of the country like TB, diarrhea and Kala Azar. Responding to that, Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, Director-General of the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR) told News18 there was a need to support indigenous research in India. In this interview to News18’s Aradhna Wal, Dr Swaminathan says India needs a 10-year vision on drug research...

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'Big Chicken': The Medical Mystery That Traced Back To Slaughterhouse Workers

Maryn McKenna | NPR | September 10, 2017

Reimert Ravenholt, a physician at the Seattle Department of Public Health, was puzzled. It was the winter of 1956, and for weeks now, local doctors had been calling him, describing blue-collar men coming into their offices with hot, red rashes and swollen boils running up their arms. The men were feverish and in so much pain they had to stay home from work, sometimes for weeks...

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A Law Professor’s Big Idea for Combating Greedy Drug Company Titans Like Martin Shkreli

Noah Berlatsky | Quartz | September 21, 2017

In 2015, CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals Martin Shkreli infamously raised the price of the life-saving drug Daraprim by 5,000%. Daraprim, developed more than 60 years ago, is used to treat the deadly parasitic infection toxoplasmosis. It was selling for $13.50 a pill; then Turing raised the price to $750. The move sparked massive backlash and Congressional hearings, and Shkreli himself was eventually arrested for, and convicted of, unrelated securities fraud charges. But the original, horrible problem didn’t get fixed. Turing kept the price sky-high; as of August 2016, many patients were paying $375 per pill...

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Antibiotic Resistance: How Industrial Agriculture Lies With Statistics

Robert Lawrence | Huffington Post | January 23, 2014

...The website of the Alliance, a coalition of corporations and trade associations that make up a who's who of industrial agriculture, says the organization wants "to engage in dialogue with consumers who have questions about how today's food is grown and raised." It appears, however, that the organization is more concerned with countering increasing awareness of the public health and environmental harms associated with industrialized agriculture...

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Big Pharma 'Overcharging' Poor Countries For Child Vaccines - Report

Staff Writer | RT News | January 21, 2015

Doctors Without Borders has released a new report blasting two top pharmaceutical companies for inflated costs of vital vaccines that have proved too steep for poor nations, recommending they adjust prices in order to save lives...

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CEO Roundtable On Cancer Launches The Project Data Sphere Initiative, A New Data Sharing And Analytic Platform For Cancer Patient Benefit

Press Release | CEO Roundtable on Cancer , SAS, Sage Bionetworks | April 8, 2014

Project Data Sphere, LLC (PDS), an independent not-for-profit initiative of the CEO Roundtable on Cancer’s Life Sciences Consortium (LSC), announced today the launch of a new data sharing platform (www.ProjectDataSphere.org), with the goal of advancing research to improve the lives of cancer patients and their families around the world...

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Could An Open-Access Database Speed Up Drug Development?

Summer Allen | AAAS Member Central | October 6, 2014

A recent study finds a significant logjam in the development of new drugs at the discovery and early preclinical phases. Could the creation of an open-source translational research database help solve the problem?...

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Doctors Given Meals by Drug Makers Prescribed More of Their Pills

Ed Silverman | STAT | June 20, 2016

Doctors who were fed meals costing even less than $20 later prescribed certain brand-name pills more often than rival medicines, according to a new analysis published on Monday of a federal database. And in most cases, costlier meals were associated with still higher prescribing rates for Medicare Part D drugs made by the same companies that provided the food. The findings, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, are likely to intensify an ongoing debate over the extent to which ties between drug makers and doctors unduly influence medical practice and the nation’s health care costs...

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European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) ChEMBL 20 incorporates the Pistoia Alliance’s HELM annotation

Press Release | Pistoia Alliance, European Bioinformatics Institute | February 3, 2015

The European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) has released version 20 of ChEMBL, the database of compound bioactivity data and drug targets. ChEMBL now incorporates the Hierarchical Editing Language for Macromolecules (HELM), the macromolecular representation standard recently released by the Pistoia Alliance.

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From Open Source to Open Science

Kevin Lustig | pharmaphorum | August 17, 2012

Kevin Lustig explores open science and how it can be used to increase access to scientific data. Kevin also looks at how pharmaceutical companies, such as Pfizer and Merck, are promoting their own brand of open science. Read More »

Gathering a Health Care Industry Around an Open Source Solution: the Success of tranSMART

Andy Oram | EMR & EHR | May 18, 2015

The role of open source software in healthcare is relatively hidden and uncelebrated, but organizations such as the tranSMART Foundation prove that it is making headway behind the scenes. tranSMART won three awards at the recent Bio‐IT World conference, including Best in Show. The tranSMART Foundation is a non‐profit organization that develops creates software for translational research, performing tasks such as searching for patterns in genomes and how they are linked to clinical outcomes. Like most of the sustainable, highly successful open source projects, tranSMART avoids hiring programmers to do the work itself, but fosters a sense of community by coordinating more than 100 developers from the companies who benefit from the software.

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Group Reports Progress on an Open Serialization Communication Standard

Pharmaceutical Technology Editors | Pharm Tech News | August 17, 2016

The Open Serialization Communication Standard (Open-SCS) Group, which held a meeting in Princeton, NJ recently, reports that it is making progress toward its goal of drafting core serialization standards to facilitate data exchange for packaging line serialization and aggregation. Open-SCS was established in 2015 by pharmaceutical manufacturers that include Abbott, Johnson and Johnson, Pfizer, Roche and Teva, as well as such vendors as Antares Vision, OCS, Omron, Optel Vision, Systech, TraceLink and Werum IT Solutions...

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Help Us Crowdsource Vaccine Prices Around The World

Carla Kweifio-Okai | The Guardian | January 20, 2015

Médecins sans Frontières is calling for the cost of the life-saving pneumococcal vaccine to be slashed, as it has become prohibitively expensive for poorer countries. Tell us how much it is costing you...

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How Big Business Buys The Right To Dodge US Taxes

Jason DeCrow | Quartz | August 26, 2014

...[F]irms like Apple, Google, or General Electric find ways avoid taxes on billions of dollars of global income. It may be bad for US taxpayers but, hey, blame lawmakers for doing such a crappy job; the companies are just following the rules that have been created for them...

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How Data Brokers Make Money Off Your Medical Records

Adam Tanner | Scientific American | February 1, 2016

A growing number of companies specialize in gathering longitudinal information from hundreds of millions of hospitals' and doctors' records, as well as from prescription and insurance claims and laboratory tests. Pooling all these data turns them into a valuable commodity. Other businesses are willing to pay for the insights that they can glean from such collections to guide their investments in the pharmaceutical industry, for example, or more precisely tailor an advertising campaign promoting a new drug...

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