Tagged with Opinion,

Japan Pfizer’s Kaneko Miyuki, writing in the September 2022 edition of DIA’s Global Forum magazine, shines a light on Japan’s new emergency approval system for pharmaceuticals. Enacted in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Japan hopes that this new regulation will allow for a more rapid and agile response to future…

ASEAN Takeda’s Soon Yee Chow and Helene Sou, writing in the September 2022 edition of DIA’s Global Forum magazine, outline how digitalisation initiatives, if properly enacted, can help the ASEAN region achieve its vision of a free-trade market for high-quality and safe drugs across member states.   One key pillar of…

Africa Lenias Hwenda of Medicines for Africa examines the true impact of access to medicine initiatives in Africa, noting that many of the measures takes are often cosmetic and leave a swathe of “impact bottlenecks” unaddressed. Hwenda calls for a more holistic approach, moving beyond simply bringing medicines to African countries…

Global While COVID-19 demonstrated the biopharma industry’s capacity for innovation and its ability to scale up manufacturing, it also exposed the challenges of ensuring equitable distribution of vaccines. In an effort to work towards solving these issues and being better prepared to respond to future pandemics, the industry has created the…

Global DIA 2022 convened with an opening plenary that explored the question What is the Future of Healthcare? from four connected perspectives—Inclusive, Global, Individual, Digital.   Barbara Lopez Kunz, Global Chief Executive, DIA “We’re here this week because we imagine a world where powerful health interventions and tools are rapidly discovered,…

India Arshia Bhandari of patient safety thought leadership forum PhVFIT examines how India is embracing a more patient-centric healthcare model via the implementation of a national patient safety implementation framework.   In April 2018, the India Ministry of Health and Family Welfare launched the National Patient Safety Implementation Framework 2018-2025 (NPSIF),…

Africa David Mukanga of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gives an overview of the latest developments on the long road towards the creation of an African Medicines Agency and the push to establish vaccine manufacturing facilities on the continent.   Since the minimum number of 15 ratifications by African Union…

USA Monica Weldon draws on her own experience as a rare disease patient advocacy group CEO to outline how such groups can work collaboratively with other stakeholders in drug development to better target funding and create a more patient-centric drug development process that ultimately gets better drugs to rare disease patients…

Australia Pharmaceutical policy issues played a major role in Australia’s recent national election. Shawview Consulting’s Brendan Shaw outlines the medicines issues that came under scrutiny during the campaign. It was the first national election since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and it resulted in an historic change of government. The…

Europe The new president of Medicines for Europe, Elisabeth Stampa, outlines one of the priorities of her mandate: working to adjust the EU pharma policy framework to improve access for patients across Europe.    Regulatory flexibilities implemented during COVID-19 showed that the EU system can require one of highest safety, quality…

Global Antimicrobial pollution is a major global health and environmental risk. Shawview Consulting’s Brendan Shaw and Nicolai Schaaf of SIWI uncover what antibiotics manufacturers are doing about it.   Last month, global leaders issued an urgent call for all countries to reduce antimicrobial pollution. This includes the safe disposal of antimicrobial…

Kenya Medicines for Africa’s Lenias Hwenda examines the significance of Moderna’s USD 500 million investment into African manufacturing, other agreements in place to boost manufacturing capacity on the continent, and why a more equally distributed global pharmaceutical manufacturing network is in the interest of the entire planet.   Many Africans welcome…