Pharmaceutical industry websites

In order to promote a uniform approach to offering compensation to subjects and indemnity to investigators and institutions conducting clinical trials, Medicines Australia has published a Form of Indemnity for Clinical Trials and Guidelines for Compensation for Injury Resulting from Participation in a Company-Sponsored Chnical Trial. These documents are based on those published by the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry and are available from www.medicinesaustralia.com.au (the Medicines Australia website). 

The Green Chemistry Institute (GCl) Pharmaceutical Roundtable has used the Process Mass Intensity (PMl) [12], defined as the total mass used in a process divided by the mass of product (i.e. PMl = E factor -i- 1) to benchmark the environmental acceptability of processes used by its members (see the GCl website). The latter include several leading pharmaceutical companies (Eh Lilly, GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, Merck, AstraZeneca, Schering-Plow, and Johnson Johnson). The aim was to use this data to drive the greening of the pharmaceutical industry. We believe, however, that the E factor is to be preferred over the PMl since the ideal E factor of 0 is a better reflection of the goal of zero waste. 

One of the most widely used chemical structure-encoding schemas in the pharmaceutical industry is the MDL Connection Table (CT) File Format. Both Molfile and SD File are based on MDL CT File Format to represent chemical structures. A Molfile represents a single chemical structure. An SD File contains one to many records, each of which has a chemical structure and other data that are associated with the structure. MDL Connection Table File Format also supports RG File to describe a single Rgroup query, rxnfile, which contains structural information of a single reaction, RD File, which has one to many records, each of which has a reaction and data associated with the reaction, and lastly, MDL s newly developed XML representation of the above—XD File. The CT File Format definition can be downloaded from the MDL website http //www.mdl.com/downloads/public/ctfile/ctfile.jsp. 

There are also over 1500 medical journals and books published in the United States that comprise the primary (research publications), secondary (review articles), and tertiary (textbooks) literature. The pharmaceutical industry also supplies promotional material, often via detail persons. With the development of the Internet, vast amounts of drug-related information have become readily available to the general public. Governmental (e.g., NIH), commercial (e.g., Pharminfo), and individual s websites provide hard data as well as controversial platforms for alternative viewpoints regarding drugs. 

Along with this emphasis on particular disorders, recent pharmaceutical industry literature for conditions like depression and psychosis refers increasingly commonly to imbalances in brain chemicals, echoing the statements of official psychiatric literature described in Chapter 1. On depression, Eli Lilly s website claims that a growing amount of evidence supports the view that people with depression have an imbalance of the brain s neurotransmitters. .. many scientists believe that an imbalance in serotonin may be an important factor in the development and severity of depression (Eli Lilly 2006a, accessed 10.02.2006). Wyeth, makers of the antidepressant Venlafaxine (brand name Effexor... 

The Swedish Classification Scheme initiated in 2005 by the Swedish Association of Pharmacy Industries (LIF), the Swedish Medical Products Agency, Apoteket (National Corporation of Swedish Pharmacies), the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions and the Stockholm County Council, take in account Persistence, Bioaccumulation and Toxicity (PBT) characteristics of pharmaceutical products. This voluntary scheme looks at the environmental hazard and the associated risk of pharmaceutical products. The environmental risk is calculated based on the ratio PEC/PNEC according to the EMEA guideline [17,124, 127]. The obtained information is only available on the website www.fss.se, since due to European restrictions it is not possible to include warning labels on the packaging of medications [17]. 

The sources listed below are the key pharmaceutical news sources that provide news from an analytical viewpoint. It is not a comprehensive list but rather a select collection of major industry publications. These sources cover financial, marketing, therapeutic category, and regulatory events. Electronic journals and websites are included as well as traditional print publications. 

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