Cambodia is expected to graduate from Least Developed Country status soon, at which time it will be required to make patents available for pharmaceutical products and processes to meet its obligations under the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). Given its...

The United States government is running a campaign to characterize other industrialized countries as free riding on high U.S. pharmaceutical prices and innovation in new drugs. The campaign is based on the argument that lower prices imposed by price controls in these countries do not pay for...

This paper presents a historical perspective on the evolution of relationships between the pharmaceutical industry and physicians in two countries, the United States and Finland. Despite divergence early the twentieth century, and the absence of any large pharmaceutical firms based in Finland,...

Canada has strengthened intellectual property (IP) protections for pharmaceutical drugs several times over the last three decades. These changes were intended to lengthen the period of market exclusivity for new brand drugs and thereby allow them to earn additional sales revenues that could be...

Cambodia is expected to graduate from Least Developed Country status soon, at which time it will be required to make patents available for pharmaceutical products and processes to meet its obligations under the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). Given its...

Over the past 35 years, patients have suffered from a largely hidden epidemic of side effects from drugs that usually have few offsetting benefits. The pharmaceutical industry has corrupted the practice of medicine through its influence over what drugs are developed, how they are tested, and how...

Data indicate that the widely touted “innovation crisis” in pharmaceuticals is a myth. The real innovation crisis, say Donald Light and Joel Lexchin, stems from current incentives that reward companies for developing large numbers of new drugs with few clinical advantages over existing ones

Navigating the Evidence: Communicating Canadian Health Policy in the Media is a compilation of the EvidenceNetwork commentaries published in major newspapers in 2014, written by experts in the health policy field. These Op-Eds highlight the most recent evidence on a wide range of topics,...

Medicine regulators rely on pivotal clinical trials to make decisions about approving a new drug, but little is known about how they judge whether pivotal trials justify the approval of new drugs. We explore this issue by looking at the positions of 3 major regulators: the European Medicines...

Prompt and affordable access to essential medicines is a component of almost all domestic and global public health models. As is now well known, the availability and costs of both brand and generic drugs is a function of traditional patent law incentives. Less known, however, is that generic...