Several recent books have criticized the pharmaceutical industry for developing too many "follow-on" or "me-too" drugs--a name given to drugs that work the same way as pioneering drugs that create a new class of treatments. Do follow-on drugs raise costs while diverting R&D funds from true innovation, and should the...

Review of The $800 Million Pill: The Truth behind the Cost of New Drugs by Merrill Goozner.

Congress should act in protecting patents for follow-on biologics, relying on a few basic principles that do not suppress research and developmentin this vital sector.

Presidential and congressional candidates are now offering several new policy proposals that would affect the pharmaceutical industry. Most of these would attempt to control the price of pharmaceutical products or affect prices by increasing the supply of imported or reimported products. One of the principal policy issues raised by...

Two recent books, Marcia Angell's The Truth About Drug Companies and Jerome Kassirer's On the Take are often grouped with other anti-pharmaceutical-industry tracts.

With the fates of the Food and Drug Administration and the pharmaceutical industry more intertwined than ever, our health depends on regulatory innovation as much as on scientific progress.

As Congress considers legislation that would allow imitative biological products, known as "biosimilars," to rely on the safety and efficacy data of original innovators, it must ensure that any provisions passed will foster, not stifle, discovery.

How severe is the crisis in the pharmaceutical industry?