John LaMattian, former head of Pfizer R&D, says industry mergers have harmed R&D efforts

John L. LaMattina, the former President of Pfizer Global Research and Development, has just published an article in Nature that looks at the impact of drug company mergers and increased industry concentration on R&D. Among his conclusions: the “impact on the R&D of the organizations involved has been devastating.”

http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v10/n8/full/nrd3514.html

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NATURE REVIEWS | DRUG DISCOVERY VOLUME 10 | AUGUST 2011 | 559

The impact of mergers on pharmaceutical R&D

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Approval, ownership, market structure, and placement on WHO EML for 100 new cancer NMEs on NCI alpha list

KEI research associate Paul Miano has written the following paper: Cancer: Approval, ownership, market structure, and placement on WHO Model Essential Medicines List, for 100 new molecular entities (NMEs) on the NCI alpha list of cancer drugs and vaccines. KEI Research Note 2011:1,

A full copy of the paper is available in PDF format here.

The following is from the introduction (sans footnotes, which are in the PDF version):

Introduction and Summary

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KEI Statement in opposition to a WIPO Treaty for Broadcasting Organizations

KEI Statement on the Broadcast Treaty at WIPO SCCR 22
June 21, 2011

KEI opposes work at WIPO on a new treaty for broadcasting organizations.

To the extent that creative works are distributed through broadcasting networks, they are nearly always protected by copyright.

In the small cases where the broadcast involves material in the public domain, it would be a mistake to give the broadcaster an intellectual property right, merely for transmitting information.

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BLS Estimates of Employment in the Sound Recording Industries

I was asked recently to look at some data on employment in the copyright industry. This addresses one set of data points, the BLS estimates of US employment in the Sound Recording Industries.

Occupational Employment Statistics

NAICS 2-Digit Industry Specific Estimates, May 2010

51 Information 2,708,760

NAICS 3-Digit Industry Specific Estimates, May 2010

511 Publishing Industries, except Internet, 758,090, 28.0%
512 Motion Picture and Sound Recording Industries, 371,450, 13.7%
515 Broadcasting (except internet), 292,010, 10.8%
517 Telecommunications, 909,780, 33.6%
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Non paper distributed at SCCR 22 at 1pm on Friday, on disabilities

In a major breakthrough on the WIPO negotiations on copyright exceptions for persons with disabilities, at around 1pm today, a non-paper “resulting from informal discussions among Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, the European Union and its Member States, Mexico, Paraguay and the United States of America” was distributed at the WIPO SCCR 22.

A copy of the document is available here:

/wp-content/uploads/text_distributed_friday_1pm.doc

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