Do large pharmaceutical companies need to go back to the drawing board on matters like basic respect in their relationships with clinical sites? Kim Oliver of Sanofi Aventis thinks of it this way: “The pharmaceutical industry is under a lot of pressure to do things faster, and with less money and fewer resources. And it’s the same…more...

The way Eli Lilly interprets it, investigator relationship management (IRM)—the recent trend among sponsors to cater to clinical sites in order to keep them around—involves figuring out who the best sites are, and giving them plenty of work. Because sheer numbers of projects is what makes sites happy, says Jim Kremidas, the company’s director of global enrollment…more...

A federal judge in New York issued a stern but meaningless order concerning Lilly’s internal documents about the bipolar disorder drug Zyprexa. The judge forced a medical consultant and a lawyer to “return” thousands of sensitive documents to Eli Lilly. The losers in the ruling include David Egilman, a Vermont medical expert for Zyprexa plaintiffs, and James…more...

Doctors are trained to deliver bad news in a gentle, sensitive manner. Alan Breier, chief medical officer of Eli Lilly, may have missed that lecture. A psychiatrist and former academic, Breier took the podium at the Clinical Trials Congress in Las Vegas and bluntly declared that many of the major organ systems of pharmaceutical research are failing.…more...