How long is the Arm of “Big Pharma”?
European Parliament, Brussels, Belgium 9.1.2018 – Report by Lauren Tuchman, ANME e.V.
This event at the European Parliament involved the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and was co-hosted by WEMOS (an independent civil society organization based in the Netherlands, whose aim is to improve public health worldwide)...
One intent behind this event was to discuss and understand how the European Medicines Agency (EMA) tackles the idea of transparency, and how the EMA is addressing and minimizing ‘conflicts of interest’. An additional focus was on a discussion of EMA’s openness/willingness to work toward greater attention, time, and allocation of resources to the idea of ‘added therapeutic value.’ This added therapeutic value could be applied to new medicines and independent clinical research as a precursor to decisions made on marketing authorization and acceptance of new pharmaceuticals; added therapeutic value could also aid in assessing, monitoring, enforcing safety, standardization, and accountability for those pharmaceuticals that are already approved and on the market.
