Drug repurposing can redeem failed treatments and squeeze out new uses from others. But many pharmaceutical companies are hesitant to retool existing drugs without a high return on investment.
Changes in the latest federal budget will mostly affect people who need multiple medicines throughout the year, perhaps for chronic disease. But there are other ways to reduce drug costs.
It’s easy to blame COVID. But Australia has suffered medicine shortages for years. The pandemic has only highlighted the problem. Here’s what we could do to better avoid shortages in the first place.
Drug development is a long and costly process that often ends in failure. Improving the way potential drug candidates are optimized could help boost success rates.
Generic drug names are often long, but they can tell doctors what type of medicine it is and how it works. But it’s brand names that appear first and most prominently in Health Canada materials.
Paxlovid is one potential COVID drug for use at home. The idea is these can potentially be prescribed at the first sign of infection to prevent serious illness and death.
A new study suggests the market alone will not deter or punish pharmaceutical companies whose products turn out to have adverse effects after they have been approved.
Non-intoxicating cannabis products are safe and well tolerated by those who use them, so why not lower the clinical threshold for their manufacture and sale?
The pharmaceutical industry overall has been deeply opposed to waiving COVID-19 vaccine patents, but a historian of the industry explains that drug companies once opposed patents altogether.
COVID-19 has exacerbated a backlog of domestic and foreign drug manufacturing inspections that the FDA is still too short-staffed to adequately deal with.