Industry campaign contributors are nudging Barack Obama to select Janet Woodcock as the next FDA head. The pitch is that she’ll guarantee continuity. Other candidates include the FDA’s own Frank Torti; Steven Nissen of the Cleveland Clinic; George Washington University professor Susan Wood; and Joshua Sharfstein, a city official in Baltimore, Maryland, who formerly worked for a key anti-industry politician in Congress. Here’s an article in Bloomberg.

The Drug Information Association announced its 8th conference on contemporary pharmacovigilance and risk management. Dates: 11-15 January, 2009. Said the meeting program chair, Stephen Goldman: “The inherent limitations of premarketing testing and constant focus on the risks associated with medical product use have fostered new thinking and methods for monitoring the evolving safety profiles of marketed products throughout their life cycle.” (We weren’t able to locate the conference URL.)

Inc. Research hired Renee Simar as principal pediatric strategist. She had worked at the Raleigh, North Carolina, firm before starting her own consultancy. Simar will develop program strategy and considerations for clinical trials in neonates, children and adolescents. “She is an incredibly valuable resource to guide customers through the intricacies involved with the design and conduct of pediatric trials,” said John Potthoff, COO at Inc. Here’s the release.

There’s a relatively new advocacy group: The Prescription Project, funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. The organization supports legislation that would require full disclosure of all industry payments to individual physicians, as this editorial in an Atlanta newspaper proposes.

Some top executives at companies like Intel, Google and Sun believe they can cure HIV, malaria and cancer and tackle the energy crisis, global warming and space travel while they’re at it. In that vein, Xconomy has published this sloppy article about the health information system industry. The story incorrectly positions SAS and Microsoft as competitors. It also fails to grasp a key distinction between between physician-controlled electronic health records and patient-driven personal health records.

Icon bought Prevalere Life Sciences, a unit of ORS Labs, for $35 million now and an additional $8.2 million contingent on future milestones. Prevalere has a 49,000 sq. ft. laboratory in Whitesboro, NY. “The acquisition of Prevalere gives Icon much greater scale in the rapidly growing market for bioanalytical and immunoassay laboratory services and adds value to our service offering in early phase clinical development,” commented Peter Gray, Icon’s CEO. Here’s the release.

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