But other off-patent drugs are doing less well without intellectual property law's protection.
"Among the folks who ran for president and Congress in 2000, about one out of every five of our TV ads was about doing something about prescription drugs, " said Democratic Georgia Sen.
For many drugs, just doing a study looking at the effects of medicines on African-Americans might be useful.
It's all about helping younger people to keep them away from crime, from drugs, from doing things which are wrong.
To make matters worse, Merck's old drugs are not doing very well.
Hauber argues that investors are expecting Astra to imitate the strategy of Bristol-Myers Squibb, which is growing by doing small acquisitions of promising drugs.
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Nissen, who is now the interim chair of cardiology at the Cleveland Clinic and president of the American College of Cardiology, has been at the forefront of doing studies for new heart drugs like AstraZeneca 's Crestor and the new "good cholesterol" drugs being developed by Pfizer.
Nissen, who is now the interim chair of cardiology at the Cleveland Clinic and president of the American College of Cardiology, has been at the forefront of doing studies for new heart drugs like AstraZeneca 's (nyse: AZN - news - people ) Crestor and the new "good cholesterol" drugs being developed by Pfizer (nyse: PFE - news - people ).
Our fee for service system rewards doctors for seeing more patients, doing more procedures and prescribing more drugs.
But they have been for criminal behaviour (doing physical harm to people, taking drugs), never for abusive speech.
The company is doing well with its immunology and oncology drugs and has showed resilience against the competition from generic drugs in central nervous system therapeutic area.
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Foreign companies have been slow to bring new drugs into Japan, because doing so requires expensive and cumbersome trials often duplicating those already carried out in other countries.
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"We are asking clubbers to try and pace themselves, to alternate their drinking with soft drinks and for them not mix alcohol with drugs as the consequences of doing so can prove fatal, " she said.
Firms find it difficult to give tests, counselling and drugs to an employee, while doing nothing for his sick wife or their ailing children.
Aspen Pharmacare is the local firm that is doing most to supply the market with the generic drugs South Africa will need.
The National Institute of Health spends billions of dollars a year doing the most risky initial research to develop blockbuster drugs that companies patent and sell for windfall profits.
Merck says it is doing everything it can to answer the questions swirling around its drugs.
Then he argued that industry was being too slow to embrace less expensive ways of doing big clinical trials, and said that yes, most drugs taken for a long period of time, not just for diabetes, need to be tested in bigger studies.
True, the practice is illegal in much of the world, but the penalties for doing it are light compared with, say, dealing in illicit drugs.
"It is extremely worrying when a residential care home charged with adminstering drugs to its elderly residents then breaks the law in doing so, " said Mr Morgan.
We are now becoming capable of doing the same for vital medical data, and not just by creating new drugs.
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?
The FDA presents evidence that it is approving drugs faster, in general, than other countries, and that it is doing so on the schedule set by a law that dictates that companies pay user fees to fund the reviews of their drugs.
FORBES: New Drug Approval Rate At Near-Record High, FDA Says
But the big trials that proved the worth of those drugs came after the medicines were cleared and marketed, and there was a huge amount of data supporting doing big tests to prove the medicines extended lives.
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