There is undoubtedly waste in the system but I visited a hospital near Piraeus two days ago that had a shortage of syringes, dressings and basic drugs.
Minnesota lawyer and businessman Scott Hillstrom started HealthStore in 1997 after traveling through Kenya and noticing that one of the big problems there was lack of reliable access to basic generic drugs.
Now, the biggest stand-alone cancer biotech company will sell mostly drugs whose basic formulations were made decades ago.
Surgical operations in the biggest hospital have had to be stopped because basic equipment is defunct and drugs have run out.
Still, some scientists worry that big, broad patents could make developing new drugs even more difficult than it already is by adding so many levels of licensing and paperwork to the research process that it will be impossible to build on basic research to invent new drugs.
Both drugs work by the same basic mechanism as Vioxx, the Merck (nyse: MRK - news - people ) drug that was pulled from the market because it doubled the increase of heart attack and stroke.
The report does little to change the basic assessment of America's war on drugs: that it has curbed casual abuse, but not serious addiction.
It also makes employees do an hour of voluntary work a week, helping children and adults with basic reading and arithmetic, running anti-drugs programmes and training people for call-centre work.
Scientists use at least 20 million rodents a year in experiments in the U.S., to test foods, drugs and chemicals and to unearth basic truths about the causation of disease and the functioning of the human immune system.
He has spent the past two years trying to sell the cyclical chunks of the group, especially basic chemicals, and to concentrate on research-intensive drugs, which produce higher margins and more stable profits.
That, in turn, could hinder emerging efforts to match patients with drugs that target the mutations affecting their tumors, a basic strategy of personalized medicine.
Even with credible government guarantees on liability and patents, and with government and universities between them doing the necessary basic research, would big pharma seek to develop and make these drugs?
Realizing that internal research alone isn't enough, Scolnick has appointed Bennett Shapiro, the former head of basic research, to beef up Merck's efforts to license new drugs.
Good research is one thing, but it takes a lot of profits from the few approved drugs that make it to market to pay for all the basic research and failed development candidates that lie beneath the surface and out of view of most people.
We can do the basic research either way: we want the market as that is what gets the new drugs, the new treatments, the new spiffiness, into the hands of people who use it to do interesting and useful things.
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If you find a key that changes basic functions of a cell and make substances that mimic these keys and locks, interesting new drugs are sure to emerge, Fujino thought.
Dotcoms may come and go, but people always need drugs, and big pharmaceutical firms need their smaller biotechnology brethren to do much of the basic research for their future products.
He says basic scientists are free to inspect the pathway, but that Ariad expects a "reasonable royalty" for commercially available drugs that impact NF-kappa-B.
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