Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and taxation

You would have to have been living under a rock somewhere to have missed the news that Pfizer is looking pretty seriously at a takeover of AstraZeneca.

Are big pharma like the mafia?

I have recently read Peter Gøtzsche’s book, “Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How big pharma has corrupted healthcare”. It’s a rant about how the pharmaceutical industry are evil and a form of “organised crime”. No, I’m not exaggerating, he actually does say that.

WDDTY and Tesco's corporate irresponsibility

I’ve written before about the magazine “What Doctors Don’t Tell You”, but just to refresh your memory, it is a dreadful pile of nonsense, carrying dangerously misleading health advice. It includes such gems as suggesting vitamin C can cure AIDS or that homeopathy can cure cancer. If you want to know more about just how outrageously irresponsible the magazine is, you might want to visit http://wwddtydty.com or look at Josephine Jones’s impressive list of links.

Clinical trials and supermarket beef lasagne

I've been thinking about how clinical trials have certain things in common with supermarket beef lasagne.

No, don't worry, we don't usually find horses hiding in inappropriate places in clinical trials. But in both cases, the key to having confidence in the product is traceability. There is a long chain of things that happen between where you start and where you end up, and knowing what happens at each stage of the process is key to verifying the authenticity of the final product.

Live blog from the DIA clinical forum

I'm writing this from the DIA clinical forum in Nice, where Alice, Nancy and I are showing Dianthus Medical to the world of clinical research at the exhibition. We've had a nice leisurely start this morning, as the exhibition didn't start until 10.30, so I had plenty of time for a pre-breakfast run this morning. Running along the seafront in Nice is a particularly lovely thing to do, particularly early in the morning when the sun is not quite above the horizon: the light over the sea is beautiful.

Annoying sales calls

It's my first morning back in the office after a lovely week's holiday in the Lake District, and already I'm feeling grumpy again. Just had a sales call from someone claiming to be from Reuters (not sure whether he really was or not) trying to sell me some expensive business intelligence reports. As I've blogged before, I find unsolicited sales calls deeply annoying, and pretty much the first thing I asked him was "are you trying to sell me anything?", to which he answered that he wasn't. After proceeding to waste 5 minutes of my time, he then tried to sell me something.