Although more and more drug advertisements are appearing on television, the bulk of the approximately $21 billion dollars that pharmaceutical companies spend annually to market their products is targeted to physicians, doctors in training (residents) and medical students.

European drug regulations need changing to ensure they meet the needs of patients and doctors, argue experts in this week’s BMJ.

Drug companies control or shape multiple steps in the research, analysis, writing, and publication of a large proportion of the medical literature, and they do so behind the scenes, according to a policy paper in this week's PLoS Medicine. The paper's author, Sergio Sismondo (Queen's University, Kingston, Canada), who is an expert in the philosophy of science, calls this phenomenon "ghost management."

Northwestern University's Charles Bennett, M.D., is a super sleuth of potentially deadly prescription drug reactions. He leads a national SWAT team of doctors called RADAR (Research on Adverse Drug Events and Reports) based out of Northwestern's Feinberg School of Medicine. They swoop in to investigate early signs of trouble years before the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) takes notice.

India is quietly assuming a new and expanded role in the discovery and development of medicines for patients in the United States and other western countries, according to an article scheduled for the May 21 issue of Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), ACS' weekly newsmagazine.

In 2002 the European parliament voted resoundingly against allowing drug companies to provide information about their products directly to patients. However, five years on, this decision is set to be challenged again.