Geneva-based Covalence, a company that markets the information system, EthicalQuote, has observed that pharma is not keeping pace with other industries in terms of the overall balance of global good and bad news coverage in four broad ethical areas: labour standards, waste management, product social utility and human rights policy. “The pharma industry is losing [...]

Prosecutors and the Polish Anti-Corruption Bureau are investigating reports that UK-based pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline allegedly bribed doctors in Poland to prescribe their drugs ahead of other manufacturers.“We believe that doctors took a form of bribes from representatives of the company in the years 2010-11,” Krzysztof Kopania, a spokesman for the regional prosecutor’s office in Lodz, [...]

Today, 13 pharmaceutical companies, the U.S., U.K. and U.A.E governments, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Bank and other global health organisations announced a new, coordinated push to accelerate progress toward eliminating or controlling 10 neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) by the end of the decade. Uniting efforts with NTD-endemic countries, partners pledged to [...]

GlaxoSmithKline Plc and Merck & Co. agreed to lower prices for vaccines to protect children against potentially deadly diarrhea, supporting an international effort to help least-developed nations fight diseases. The GAVI Alliance, set up by Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates to give the world’s poorest people better access to life- saving immunizations, also received commitments [...]

Six pharmaceutical companies and several governments have pledged more than $150m in medicines and funding over five years to tackle some of the most neglected diseases. The debilitating illnesses – including leprosy, lymphatic filariasis and sleeping sickness – affect 1bn of the world’s poorest people, place a burden on health services, stunt children’s education and [...]

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) is to donate 50 million doses of pandemic H1N1 vaccine to the World Health Organization (WHO) under an agreement signed at WHO headquarters in Geneva by the WHO Director-General, Dr Margaret Chan, and the Chief Executive Officer of GlaxoSmithKline, Mr Andrew Witty. “We welcome this very generous donation by GlaxoSmithKline, which will go [...]

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) welcomes Mr. Witty’s recognition that patents act as a barrier to research and development and that patent pools offer new ways to stimulate research into neglected diseases. Promises now need to be turned into action. The terms of any licenses attached to the patent pool will be critical and [...]

People in developing countries run health risks from pharmaceutical companies testing drugs on them for the Western market. An Indian research report published today again shows several pharmaceutical companies’ disregard for ethical rules. ‘The Indian Centre for Studies in Ethics and Rights has examined, among other things, the way GlaxoSmithKline tested a breast cancer drug [...]

Increased attention on product human risk and smaller media coverage of drug donations have challenged Pharmaceuticals’ ethical reputation last year, states a report published today by Geneva-based research firm Covalence – Covalence Pharmaceutical Industry Report 2008. The pharmaceutical industry dropped from the first to the third rank of Covalence all-time EthicalQuote ranking across 10 industries. [...]

European regulators raided some of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies yesterday in an inquiry into whether they conspired to keep up the price of drugs after patents expired. Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca and Sanofi-Aventis were among those that confirmed they had been visited as part of a European Commission-led probe into delays in the launch of [...]