If not, Jesper Lyng Jensen's innovative new training tool, the pharma board game 'Risky Business,' will be able to help them.
Pamela Santoni and Thomas Foster discuss the changing economics of oncology.
An adaptive clinical trial is defined as a study that includes a sequence of interim analyses to enable sponsors to modify the course of a trial dynamically. The earliest and simplest forms of adaptive trials were those where interim analyses were used to stop trials early, because of overwhelming (and statistically significant) evidence of efficacy.
Jacky Law outlines the strengths and weaknesses of lifestyle drugs and assesses Big Pharma's challenge in maximizing their potential.
Launched by George N. Hatsopoulos in 1956, Thermo Electron Corporation has been described as a 'technological incubator.' Over the years, its zealous acquisition policy meant that around 150 companies — producing measurement and detection equipment, analytical and monitoring instruments and biomedical research products — were brought into the Thermo fold. Hatsopoulos, a strong believer in decentralization and local ownership, ran Thermo from its headquarters in Waltham, Massachusetts, USA, for 44 years. He stepped down in January 2000; by then it was clear that Thermo's multiplicity was becoming a liability. For Thermo to survive, things needed to change.
Pharmaceutical companies often get wrongly criticized for their apparent focus on profits rather than patients. And our commitment to corporate social responsibility is brought into question when we are deemed not to be putting our money where our mouth is.
In the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the anthrax threats that followed, governments enacted biosecurity laws and leading biomedical journals — including Nature and the New England Journal of Medicine — put new review mechanisms in place to ensure papers describing methods or materials that raise security issues are either modified or not published.
There's something barbaric about cancer treatment. Doctors cut patients open, slice pieces away, burn people with radiation and pump them full of harsh chemicals. This modern healing ritual is the best we've come up with. And even for the patients who endure the treatment and survive the disease, they are still left to wonder, "Will it come back? Will I have to go through this again?"
01 March 2006
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The recent film The Island, starring Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johannson, centres on a kind of macabre gene therapy: 30 years from now, the story goes, we'll each have a clone, a 'product' whose purpose is to act as a spare part for the real us whenever we need a new liver, heart or lung. The problem is, the clones don't know they're clones: they think they're the last human survivors of some global apocalyptic disaster living in cosy isolation from a contaminated world. The twist is provided by the daily lottery event, where the lucky winners are selected to go to 'the island,' the last unspoilt place on earth. Funny how this event coincides with a serious medical complication for the clones' 'owner.' But the illusion of a Nirvana created by a lottery that sooner or later everybody will win keeps the 'survivors' happy.
