The International Trachoma Initiative (ITI) and Spanish Pfizer Inc. will jointly carry out free operations on 1,000 trachoma patients in Hai Duong Province from March 10 to 20. Eight volunteer doctors from Pfizer Inc. will perform the surgery in cooperation with the Social Diseases Prevention Center in the northern province. Each operation was estimated to [...]

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 [...]

Pharmaceutical companies carry increasing ethical risks related to innovation, states a report released on 29 August 2007 by Geneva-based ethical reputation research firm Covalence, Covalence Pharmaceutical Industry Report 2007. These innovation-related risks deal with intellectual property rights, drug pricing, clinical trials, drug side-effects and transparency. In terms of ethical reputation, innovation seems to bring more [...]

GlaxoSmithKline is at the top of ethical-monitoring firm Covalence’s ranking list, followed by Bristol-Myers Squibb and Johnson & Johnson. The quarterly report, which ranks the top 10 highest-ranking pharmas, reveals that the amount of revenue a company earns does not necessarily correspond to its ethical reputation. Pfizer, the world’s highest revenue-generating drug company, only placed [...]

In these ethically challenging times, which drugmaker has its act together? Covalence, a research group based in Geneva that tracks ethical reputations, recently released its quarterly update in which various industrial sectors were examined. The firm compiles its rankings and charts by collecting reports – both positive and negative recent news – from the Internet [...]

The latest ethical reputations of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies have been revealed, with GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) emerging as big pharma’s Mother Theresa, according to a recently-released compilation by Geneva-based ethical-monitoring firm Covalence. Interestingly, earning power and ethical nature do not necessarily appear to go hand in hand. Covalence has published its quarterly ethical reputation ranking, [...]

Four of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies are proposing to launch a television station to tell the public about their drugs, amid strenuous lobbying across Europe by the industry for an end to restrictions aimed at protecting patients. Pharma TV would be a dedicated interactive digital channel funded by the industry with health news and [...]

Hillary Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner for the White House, on Sunday said she had raised $26m since she entered the race – almost twice her campaign’s target and more than three times the record for the first quarter of the year before a presidential election. (…) A group of more than 20 large fund managers [...]