Pharmaceutical Industry Archives

If policymakers fail to address the challenge of antimicrobial resistance they risk seeing the rise of a silent pandemic, write Stella Kyriakides and Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

The European Parliament will put pressure on the Commission and the member states to provide the necessary regulatory framework for nanomedicines in order to better make use of their potential for patients, EU lawmaker Pietro Fiocchi told EURACTIV in an interview.

The European Commission will examine specific incentives and a new pricing system to develop innovative antibiotics in its pharmaceutical strategy, in a bid to take a more ambitious stance against the rising threat of anti-microbial resistance (AMR).

Affordability, availability and sustainability are the main focus points of the EU’s new pharmaceutical strategy, due to be published on Wednesday (25 November). 

There is an urgent need for specific recommendations over lung-cancer screening at the highest political levels in order to detect early and tackle lung cancer, the “biggest killer cancer”, stakeholders have said.

Europe needs to give EU Orphan Drugs regulation more time to show its effectiveness before reviewing the incentives it provides and putting pharma innovation to the test, economist Adam Hutchings told EURACTIV in an interview.

The EU's Orphan Regulation was introduced in 2000 and its main objective was to address the challenge of regulating medicines which treat an estimated 30 million patients with rare diseases across the EU.

In the absence of the EU orphan drugs regulation, which focuses on rare diseases, approximately two million patients would not get access to therapies, a new industry-funded report has found.

The lack of a fit-for-purpose regulatory framework on nanomedicines and their “generics” poses risks for the safety of EU patients and this is something that the European Commission should urgently look at, EAASM has said. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has reminded Europe that its piecemeal approach to investing in the digitisation of health systems comes at a cost, but not all countries and policymakers have yet learned the lesson, the chairman of the European Connected Health Alliance told EURACTIV.

European citizens have been exemplary in their fight against COVID 19. They have bravely overcome an acute sanitary threat and paid the high economic, social and psychological price of the lockdown, write a group of European lawmakers.

Early dialogue between stakeholders is crucial for the effective development and success of rare orphan drugs, used to treat patients with rare diseases, Anna Bucsics, project adviser at the mechanism of coordinated access to orphan medicinal products (MoCA), told EURACTIV in an interview.

COVID-19 has demonstrated in a quite dramatic way the huge impact of a global threat on public health and economy. While the COVID-19 crisis took us by surprise, our world faces a silent threat that is predictable and preventable, writes Hubertus Von Baumbach, the CEO of pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim.

When it comes to rare diseases and 'orphan drugs', technology is there to support an “objective” EU tool that could provide the pharma industry with the necessary incentives to research and produce orphan drugs and simultaneously avoid exhausting ailing health systems, MEP Stelios Kympouropoulos told EURACTIV in an interview.

The Orphan Regulation was introduced in 2000 and its main objective was to address the challenge of regulating medicines which treat patients with rare diseases. Around 246,000 people suffer from such diseases across the EU, The European Commission is expected to present …

The European Commission is expected to present by the end of July an evaluation study on the pros and cons of the application of orphan and paediatric regulations, which deal with a niche segment of rare diseases that affect fewer than five in 10,000 people.

After over 78 environmental and agricultural organisations signing a letter this week calling for a moratorium on gene drive technology, EURACTIV took a closer look at the controversial technology to find out about what it is and the implications it holds.

A joint COVID-19 recovery proposal put forward by French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Monday (18 May) calls for a new European approach to health crises, aiming for greater EU sovereignty on medical products and pharmaceuticals.

Oxfam is urging governments and pharmaceutical companies to guarantee that vaccines, tests, and treatments will be patent-free and equitably distributed to all nations and people, ahead of the World Health Assembly next week.

How to ensure access for all to a coronavirus vaccine should be the priority for world leaders. Dr Bernard Pécoul offers five ideas leaders should consider this week as they aim to raise €7.5 billion to fund vaccine research.

The EU needs to focus on ways to bring the production of medicines and pharmaceutical ingredients back to Europe to avoid a future recurrence of shortages experienced during the COVID-19 crisis, the EU health boss Stella Kyriakides told MEPs on Tuesday (22 April).

After the coronavirus crisis is over, Europe will need policies that can create a research ecosystem in the long run as well as ensure access to medicines to the patients who need them in a way that is sustainable for health systems today and tomorrow, a leading representative of European pharmaceuticals told EURACTIV in an interview.

The European Commission is planning to re-open basically all files related to the pharmaceutical industry with its roadmap for a new Pharmaceutical Strategy, seen by EURACTIV.com.

The President of the European Commission launched an EU-wide public consultation on Europe's Beating Cancer Plan on Tuesday (4 February), announcing an EU-wide "open health data space" in support of research, prevention and cure.