-Down to Earth Pharma company's strategy of different prices for different countries to affect quality treatment of 185 million people infected with Hepatitis C worldwide Health activists and agencies on Tuesday criticised leading pharmaceutical company Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS)'s commercial strategy to sell new Hepatitis C medicine Daclatasvir, stating it would exclude a large number of patients who cannot afford expensive treatment. BMS had announced that it would create a tiered pricing strategy for...

-The Times of India Funding for one of the foremost drug discovery projects in India came to an end on Monday as the financial year closed because the ministry of science and technology did not clear the cabinet note meant to extend funding for the project on time. The Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD) project of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), meant to discover drugs for neglected diseases, had...

-The Times of India MUMBAI: The treatment of lakhs of tuberculosis (TB) patients, especially children, across the country has been jeopardized over the past few weeks as India battles a severe shortage of key TB drugs. The stock-outs are more to do with two categories: paediatric and drug-resistant TB or DR-TB, industry experts say. Medical experts say that unless the government intervenes immediately, such acute shortage of drugs could prove disastrous for...

-The Hindu     Protesters see attempt by EU to undermine Indian judiciary in the EU-FTA pact People living with HIV, cancer patient groups and public health activists came out on the streets on Wednesday demanding that India reject the European Union's demands in the European Union-India Free Trade Agreement (EU-India FTA) negotiations. The protests coincide with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's visit to Germany to meet Chancellor Angela Merkel with the FTA on top of...

-The Times of India Big pharma may be crying hoarse over India's "weak'' intellectual property environment, but over the past five years or so, they have introduced only a handful of their patented blockbusters in the country. That's not all. The contribution of patented drugs in the Rs 72,000-crore pharma retail market is not even 1%, indicating that multinationals have been traditionally slow and have a poor track record in introducing...