Regulation The UK Prime Minister has been convinced by medical professionals to fortify all flour with folic acid to reduce the number of birth defects in newborns. A large cohort of government and NHS advisors are in support of fortification, which already occurs in over 80 countries including the US. It…

Cannabis The opioid epidemic has reached new heights of late, claiming an estimated 40,000 American lives every year. The highly addictive nature of opium-derived medicine is the cause of the rising number of overdoses in the US and Canada. There are companies out there that are working to manufacture a new…

Regulation As deputy director of health and nutrition at the European Commission EC, Martin Seychell has a lot on his plate if we are to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) –which aim to significantly improve life for all people on earth by 2030. One of the biggest challenges we face in…

Innovation Axel Schumacher, co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Shivom, highlights the need for Big Pharma to adopt new technology. Of course, we know that pharma is often innovation-averse. The healthcare industry has been full of disruptions in the last decade, ranging from the explosive growth of medical devices and the…

Innovation Meghann Chilcott, Senior Vice President of OrderInsite, discusses the changing role of pharmacists and technicians.   Patients are consumers, and they expect more from pharmacies than a collection of pill bottles. Local pharmacists have seen their roles continually change over recent years due to enhanced technology that allows them better…

Europe At last week’s European Health Forum Gastein (EHFG), the theme surrounded the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030. Out of the 17 SDGs, 12 are in some way connected to health and nutrition. In attendance were key stakeholders in European health including Martin Seychell, deputy director of health…

China Professor Richard Barker, founder of New Medicine Partners reflects on China’s very different approach to the biopharma industry.   Napoleon once said: “China is a sleeping giant. Let her sleep, for when she wakes she will shake the world.” Well, in biotech, she is now wide awake I’ve recently returned from…

Innovation Article contributed by Carla Smith, Executive Vice President of The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) for PharmaBoardroom. We must assertively bend the arc of technology towards our patients, clinicians, researchers, and caregivers, and re-humanise the health system. One of the many ways patients are de-humanized in a health…

Algeria With non WTO members such as Algeria flouting intellectual property (IP) it raises the issue of how best to protect and price medicines in the future. In a fascinating interview we spoke to Rachid Kerrar from the Algerian firm Beker about their development of a cheaper, generic version of Gilead’s…

regulation Chinese ecommerce behemoths Alibaba and JD.com are being used to buy and sell tens of thousands of prescription medicines, skirting regulations in what is a legal grey area. According to a recent Financial Times report, dozens of listings from third party vendors – mainly pharmacies – for drugs such as…

Turkey With its current turbulent economic and political climate, Turkey is betting its future prosperity on 2 key aspects – its young talent pool and its location as an intersection between the West and the East. Hakan Yurdakul, head of economy monitoring and coordination at the Presidency Office is bullish, “The…

Spain Spanish stakeholders have been trailblazing the concept of the “liquid hospital”, which envisions the virtual and physical expansion of healthcare provision beyond the parameters of the traditional centralized hospital structure. The aim is to leverage connectivity, telemedicine, the Internet of Things (IoT) along with social media to co-opt patients, families…