Ireland has become a key manufacturing centre for the global pharmaceutical market and in turn pharmaceutical manufacturing is now the backbone of the Irish economy. How the industry evolved from small firms that supplied the Irish market only, a sector that was threatened by the introduction of free trade in the 1960s, to becoming a home to most of the world's leading pharma firms over the course of the last fifty years is the theme of this book. It is an Irish success story that has helped to transform Ireland. It tells how inspired leadership, an attractive investment package, and the occasional piece of luck enabled Ireland to opportunistically 'grab the future'. It was not a journey without controversy and confrontation most noticeably on environmental issues. How these disputes were resolved is a key part of this story which concludes with a look at the medium and long-term challenges to the sector.
Originally published in 2012, revised edition published in 2013, by Fourth Estate, Great Britain; Published in the United States in 2012, revised edition also, by Faber and Faber, Inc.
The biopharmaceutical industry has been a major driver of technological change in health care, producing unprecedented benefits for patients, cost challenges for payers, and profits for shareholders. As consumers and companies benefit from access to new drugs, policymakers around the globe seek mechanisms to control prices and expenditures commensurate with value. More recently the 1990s productivity boom of new products has turned into a productivity bust, with fewer and more modest innovations, and flat or declining revenues for innovative firms as generics replace their former blockbuster products. This timely volume examines the economics of the biopharmaceutical industry, with eighteen chapters by leading academic health economists. Part one examines the economics of biopharmaceutical innovation including determinants of the costs and returns to new drug development; how capital markets finance R&D and how costs of financing the biopharmaceutical industry compare to financing costs for other industries; the effects of safety and efficacy regulation by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and of price and reimbursement regulation on incentives for innovation; and the role of patents and regulatory exclusivities. Part two examines the market for biopharmaceuticals with chapters on prices and reimbursement in the US, the EU, and other industrialized countries, and in developing countries. It looks at the optimal design of insurance for drugs and the effects of cost sharing on spending and on health outcomes; how to measure the value of pharmaceuticals using pharmacoeconomics, including theory, practical challenges, and policy issues; how to measure pharmaceutical price growth over time and recent evidence; empirical evidence on the value of pharmaceuticals in terms of health outcomes; promotion of pharmaceuticals to physicians and consumers; the economics of vaccines; and a review of the evidence on effects of mergers, acquisitions and alliances. Each chapter summarizes the latest insights from theory and recent empirical evidence, and outlines important unanswered questions and areas for future research. Based on solid economics, it is nevertheless written in terms accessible to the general reader. The book is thus recommended reading for academic economists and non-economists, and for those in industry and policy who wish to understand the economics of this fascinating industry.
This searing indictment, David Healy’s most comprehensive and forceful argument against the pharmaceuticalization of medicine, tackles problems in health care that are leading to a growing number of deaths and disabilities. Healy, who was the first to draw attention to the now well-publicized suicide-inducing side effects of many anti-depressants, attributes our current state of affairs to three key factors: product rather than process patents on drugs, the classification of certain drugs as prescription-only, and industry-controlled drug trials. These developments have tied the survival of pharmaceutical companies to the development of blockbuster drugs, so that they must overhype benefits and deny real hazards. Healy further explains why these trends have basically ended the possibility of universal health care in the United States and elsewhere around the world. He concludes with suggestions for reform of our currently corrupted evidence-based medical system.
The pharmaceutical industry exists to serve the community, but over the years it has engaged massively in corporate crime, with the public footing the bill. This readable study by experts in medicine, law, criminology and public health documents the pr
MAY 2014. The Irish public woke to the horrific discovery of a mass grave containing the remains of most 800 babies in the ‘Angels’ Plot’ of Tuam’s Mother and Baby Home. What followed would rock the last vestiges of Catholic Ireland, enrage an increasingly secularised nation, and lead to a Commission of Inquiry. In The Adoption Machine, Paul Jude Redmond, Chairperson of the Coalition of Mother and Baby Homes Survivors, who himself was born in the Castlepollard Home, candidly reveals the shocking history of one of the worst abuses of Church power since the foundation of the Irish State. From Bessboro, Castlepollard, and Sean Ross Abbey to St. Patrick’s and Tuam, a dark shadow was cast by the collusion between Church and State in the systematic repression of women and the wilful neglect of illegitimate babies, resulting in the deaths of thousands. It was Paul’s exhaustive research that widened the global media’s attention to all the homes and revealed Tuam as just the tip of the iceberg of the horrors that lay beneath. He further reveals the vast profits generated by selling babies to wealthy adoptive parents, and details how infants were volunteered to a pharmaceutical company for drug trials without the consent of their natural mothers. Interwoven throughout is Paul’s poignant and deeply personal journey of discovery as he attempts to find his own natural mother. The Adoption Machine exposes this dark history of Ireland’s shameful and secret past, and the efforts to bring it into the light. It is a history from which there is no turning away.
The breadth of the pharmaceutical medicine can be daunting, but this book is designed to navigate a path through the speciality. Providing a broad overview of all topics relevant to the discipline of pharmaceutical medicine, it gives you the facts fast, in a user-friendly format, without having to dive through page upon page of dense text. With 136 chapters spread across 8 sections, the text offers a thorough grounding in issues ranging from medicines regulation to clinical trial design and data management. This makes it a useful revision aid for exams as well as giving you a taster of areas of pharmaceutical medicine adjacent to your current role. For healthcare professionals already working in the field, this book offers a guiding hand in difficult situations as well as supplying rapid access to the latest recommendations and guidelines. Written by authors with experience in the industry and drug regulation, this comprehensive and authoritative guide provides a shoulder to lean on throughout your pharmaceutical career.
Get an inside look at the lives of military and civilian pharmacists during wartime! Pharmacy in World War II is a comprehensive history of American pharmacy, both in the military and on the home front, from 1941 to 1945. The book provides a unique insight into the profession, the practice, and its practitioners through the memories of those who served as pharmacist mates, corpsmen, or civilian pharmacists. Through accounts recorded in publications, stored in archives, or told first-hand, you’ll learn about the fight to establish an Army Pharmacy Corps, the work of the Selective Service committees to preserve an adequate pool of pharmacists for civilian practice, the bond drives that would buy hospital airplanes and trains, and a great deal more. Pharmacy in World War II also looks at the organizational, economic, educational, professional, and societal issues that molded pharmacy during a watershed in modern American history. Author Dennis B. Worthen, editor-in-chief of Haworth’s Pharmaceutical Heritage book series, compiled a database of more than 11,000 pharmacists, pharmacy students, and veterans in pharmacy school during wartime as part of the “Memories Project” that recalls the activities of the professional, trade, and educational institutions of pharmacy, their goals and development, and their interactions, agreements, and differences. The book examines the fight for an Army Pharmacy Corps, shortages and rationing on the home front, manpower shortages, the impact of the Selective Service, and the prevalent attitude in the military that pharmacy was a business, not a learned profession, and that pharmaceutical services could be learned with 90 days of training. Pharmacy in World War II includes memories of: pharmacy in the pre-World War II years pharmacy education the Selective Service the drugstore’s role in the war effort the Pharmacy Corps returning veterans The book also includes photographs and images as well as appendices listing colleges and schools of pharmacy, Selective Service pharmacy advisory committees, pharmacy organizations and leaders, extracts from Army medical departments supply catalogs, and pharmacists and pharmacy students who died in the war. Pharmacy in World War II is an invaluable document for pharmacy students, practitioners, and educators, and for students of American history.
