Essential Medicines News

Linda Johnson, “Drug makers doing better on study info,” Associated Press, 10 January 2007.
Medical journals have been pressuring pharmaceutical companies to make their clinical studies available to the public for general review, to reduce the bias in publishing only the studies that support the use of a drug. In 2006, only 8% of […]

“UK PubMed Central launched today,” press release, Joint Information Systems Committee, 8 January 2007.
Peter Suber, “UKPMC and a handful of OA mandates,” Open Access News, 8 January 2007.
Modeled on the American PubMedCentral, UK PubMedCentral will be a repository for biomedical research. The repository is supported by a group of nine government and charitable research funders.
As […]

Christine Gorman, “Name That Life Saver!,” Time Global Health Blog, 8 January 2007.
A round-up of recent medical Web 2.0 projects, including Connotea, Public Library of Science, the New England Journal of Medicine’s beta projects, and a British Medical Journal vote on the most important medical advance since 1840.

Gene Russo, “NIH offers free access to wealth of disease data,” Nature, 444: 982, 21 December 2006. (Subscription required.) DOI: 10.1038/444982b
This article covers the launch of U.S. National Institutes of Health’s database of Genotype and Phenotype.
An unprecedented repository of disease-related data is bringing together information about the genes, health and lifestyles of thousands of subjects […]

Martin Enserink, “WHO Panel Weighs Radical Ideas,” Science, 314: 1373, 1 December 2006. (Subscription required.)
Short article on reforms to be discussed at the World Health Organization’s Intergovermental Working Group on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property regarding the current IP framework.
The main proposal is James Love’s “R&D Treaty” where member countries agree to spend a […]

There are several notable pieces in the 23 December issue of the British Medical Journal.
Joseph E. Stiglitz, “Scrooge and intellectual property rights,” editorial, British Medical Journal, 23 December 2006.
Stiglitz criticizes intellectual property rights in medicine, arguing that monopolies are inefficient. Instead, he proposes prize funding for discovering cures.
Stiglitz won the Nobel Prize in economics in […]