Pharma Blog Watch

Informed Consent in the ICU (Health Business Blog)
In his entry, David Williams writes about a study of informed consent in trials conducted in hospital intensive care units (ICUs), which "comes to the not very surprising finding that most patients who consented to participation in a trial don't really know what's going on," he writes. "I would have been shocked if the data showed anything else."

"A more useful study, in my view, would examine how many patients undergoing elective procedures or enrolling in clinical trials outside of the hospital understand what is happening," he concludes.

'Copycat' Drugs (DrugWonks)
In his post, Robert Goldberg disagrees with a recent letter to the editor in the New York Times written by Marcia Angell, who in 2004 wrote The Truth About the Drug Companies. The book "had one main point: Most drugs developed by pharmaceutical firms are just copycats that have no real clinical value to patients and those that do were developed by the government or academics without any biotech or pharmaceutical company input," he writes.

"Now in the face of mechanistic evidence that different drugs in a therapeutic [class] not only provide clinical benefit to different groups of people based on genetic variation but will be the foundation of drug development in the future, Angell persists in pushing her outdated and dangerous message."