Pharma Corruption Hurts Patient Care & Medical Knowledge: Rodwin Explains

Corruption is a sensitive, difficult and important topic no matter where it may surface. And the pharmaceutical industry is no exception, particularly after scandals over the past decade involving drug safety and the disclosure of clinical trial data. These episodes have prompted legislation, litigation and various other efforts to generate change. A new batch of papers published in The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics – and generated by the Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University – reviews various ongoing issues and offer ideas for improvement. The suggestions, some of which are more likely to be complicated to implement than others, include pricing drugs based on value; full public funding for FDA activities; a rating system designed to improve conduct; changing reimbursement to discourage off-label marketing, and splitting companies into separate entities, one of which is devoted to R&D and the other to manufacturing and marketing, among other things (here is a link to a summary and another link to each of the individual articles). We spoke with Marc Rodwin, a professor at Suffolk University Law School and a lab fellow at the Safra Center, about the challenges in addressing these topics.. Pharmalot: What prompted this effort, this group of articles? Rodwin: The authors are all affiliated with the Harvard University, Edmond . Safra Center lab on Institutional Corruption.  So the authors shared an interest in institutional corruption. The lab fo...
Source: Pharmalot - Category: Pharma Commentators Authors: Source Type: blogs