Pharmaceutical Executive-05-01-2001

London-Government and industry have agreed there should be no weakening of patent protection in the effort to speed access to medicines in the developing world.

Grass never grew under her feet. She steadily rose to the top from the ranks of her industry. Now one of a handful of executive vice-presidents on the chairman's own management team, she co-directs the most important unit in the Pharmacia corporation, prescription pharmaceuticals, holding the title of president in that business.

Pharmaceutical executives should study their own scientists. They construct clever tools to explore convoluted phenomena. They are the true friends of complexity.

Now that the pharma sales rep market has reached its saturation point, companies must focus on retention.

Companies that fail to comply with regulatory guidelines make easy targets for investigators.

A new task force will examine European pharma}s competitiveness, innovation, and commitment to public health. The "G10" is not, as it may sound, an enlarged grouping of the world}s leading industrialized countries. It}s actually far more important than that.

Straddling the divide between drug discovery and drug delivery, Protarga doesn't fit neatly into any pharma category. It's not exactly a delivery technology company, because its products are patentable new entities that it plans to keep for itself. Nor is it purely biotech, because it works with chemical compounds. And in the end, president and CEO Nigel Webb expects Protarga to become a fully integrated pharma company-but only in the virtual sense.

Companies Face Costly System Overhauls With New FDA Regulations

Concern that gene and stem-cell research could lead to human cloning has generated proposals for legislative bans, which could block promising research.