Archive for September 2008

Do pharmaceutical ads really increase drug sales? After all, pharmaceutical companies spend billions of dollars each year in the US on direct-to-consumer ads (DTCA). However, a new Harvard study is suggesting that DTCA may not be as effective as was previously thought. When looking at the sales patterns it was noted that DTCA had no effect whatsoever on certain drugs, while at times it may have increased the initial sales of the drug only. The US and New Zealand are the only two countries in the world that allow companies to directly market drugs to consumers. Full story.

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Researchers at the Wistar Institute have deciphered the structure of the active region of telomerase, an enzyme involved in cancer development. For more than a decade, researchers have been looking for drugs that shut down this enzyme because it is active in almost all human tumors. Therefore, the elucidation of telomerase’s molecular structure will allow scientists to create drugs that specifically target it’s active region, and hopefully stop cancer growth. Full story.

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