Doctors in India accused of overcharging patients for vaccines. (APPhoto/Kevin Frayer)

[Examiner] According to a recent article in The Economic Times, New Delhi, complaints have been filed against 1,992 doctors in India alleging they violated professional ethics by receiving gifts, hospitality, or monetary grants from pharmaceutical companies.
The Medical Council of India amended its professional code of ethics [...]

(Bloomberg) — The U.S. government’s cancer research network is “approaching a state of crisis” as waste and inefficiency cause 40 percent of late-stage trials it funds to be abandoned before completion, a report found.
The government-funded National Cancer Institute’s clinical trials group isn’t able to effectively study the benefits of new and current treatments, according to [...]

In 1951, doctors removed Henrietta Lacks’s cells without her consent. More than half a century later, companies have made millions from her cell culture, while few of Lacks’s descendants can even afford insurance.
[Newsweek] The unsettling story of Henrietta Lacks begins with an everyday occurrence: a trip to the doctor’s office. The 30-year-old African-American’s 1951 diagnosis [...]

[NYTimes]  Andrew Witty is not quite as young or as buff as Anderson Cooper, but he does do interviews in shirtsleeves from the slums of Nairobi and rural hospitals in Uganda.  
What makes that unusual is that Mr. Witty is not a roving CNN anchor, but the chief executive of GlaxoSmithKline, the world’s second-largest drug company.
Besides being [...]

[MHT] When it comes to vaccines, everyone now wants to get in on the action. That’s according to Paul Bogorad, a senior manager at pharmaceutical and biotechnology consultancy Putnam Associates in Burlington. Bogorad and other analysts say that the frenzy over H1N1 has heightened the public’s awareness of the difficulty of making vaccines and has [...]

[medscape] As healthcare reform legislation grinds its way through Congress, 2 articles published online January 6 in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) advocate for one of its touchiest provisions — comparative-effectiveness research (CER).
In theory, CER sounds like a calm, academic subject: evaluate different treatment options for a given illness — drug A vs [...]

[msnbc] Analysis of a dozen published studies testing possible new uses for a Pfizer Inc. epilepsy drug found that reporting of the results was often misleading, indicating the medicine worked better than internal company documents showed.
According to the report, when a company-funded study’s primary finding wasn’t favorable, that result was usually buried and something else [...]

[July 7, 2009] The National Institutes of Health (NIH) published today the final version of its Guidelines for Human Stem Cell Research. On March 9, 2009, President Barack H. Obama issued Executive Order 13505: ‘Removing Barriers to Responsible Scientific Research Involving Human Stem Cells’. The Executive Order states that the Secretary of Health and Human Services, [...]