Free Republic

Less stringent regulations in Asian nations reduce the timeline for drug discovery. January 16, 2006 The drug discovery outsourcing market for India and China will grow 15.3 percent annually to $19.8 billion in 2011 from $7.3 billion in 2004, according to a report released Monday by the research firm Frost & Sullivan. With competition in the global market escalating, multinational companies are aggressively outsourcing their production facilities. Global pharmaceutical manufacturing was worth nearly $50 billion in 2004. India and China have the potential to garner about 35 to 40 percent of the outsourced market, said the report. The revenue forecasts...

The FDA allowed Merck to claim that Vioxx was gentler on the stomach than naproxen, but many patients might be surprised to learn that Pfizer has never conclusively demonstrated the gastrointestinal superiority of Celebrex. For Susan Ferris, the drug Celebrex has been "a godsend." The 48-year-old South Florida woman has been taking it for her arthritis pain since 2001. She can't tolerate older remedies, such as aspirin or ibuprofen. Since Friday's announcement that Celebrex might be linked to heart attacks and strokes, though, she's not sure what to think. On top of that, she worries about her 58-year-old husband, who...

America's pharmaceutical industry is under attack. Critics have pejoratively nicknamed the industry "Big Pharma" (to conjure up an image of it being in a line-up next to "Big Tobacco") and characterize it as uncaring, duplicitous, profit-hungry and manipulative. The resentment of the industry is palpable -- whether in my own conversations with relatives and friends (particularly elderly and/or infirm ones) or in Congress, where advocates are demanding the legalization of drug importation from Canada and elsewhere in a desperate (and in the long run, futile) attempt to bring prices down. Perhaps nowhere does the strident criticism of the industry come...