24.02.2022 

Leeza Osipenko, PhD
Pharmaceutical innovation: where does it come from? How much does academia contribute compared to industry? What do the medicines entering the market offer to patients in terms of clinical benefit? We look at the decade of medicines’ launched in the French market (2008-2018). Most of these medicines entered other EU and North American markets at the same time. We compare these medicines in terms of additional clinical benefit and their origin (academia/industry). We also investigate differences between combination and non-combination products, and how medicines’ origin and their clinical benefit rank by therapeutic category.

Video | Slides

10.03.2022 

Pierre Chirac
How many new drugs offer an advantage and how many bring nothing new? Very few sources in the world can answer this question. Prescrire has done that since 1981. Run by a non-profit organisation, Prescrire has been fully financed by its subscribers (26,000 in 2022) since 1993. The 150 editors (mostly medical doctors and pharmacists) have no conflict of interest with industry, and work collectively following an original multistep process. A “critical eye on new drugs”, Prescrire has almost never been sued by companies and never lost the cases. Prescrire is also very much involved in policy advocacy at the European level, challenging the European institutions (Commission, Council, Parliament and European Medicines Agency) to better serve the needs of patients and health professionals. This talk is about explaining Prescrire: the reason for its existence, people behind it, operations, main achievements, and limitations.

Video | Slides

24.03.2022 

Javier Guzman, MD
Low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) have pledged to achieve universal health coverage (UHC) as part of their commitment to attain the Sustainable Development Goals. During this journey, some LMICs have decided to institutionalize systematic priority setting and have used health technology assessment to determine what services should be available under UHC, to whom should they be made available, and what (if any) user charges or other arrangements should be attached to services that are not considered priorities given budget constraints. This webinar will go through some lessons learned in this process and will highlight some successes and failures that can help countries interested in deepening or pursuing this journey going forward.

Video | Slides

07.04.2022

Christopher Booth, MD
Therapeutic advances have transformed the outcomes of some cancers. However, there is growing recognition that many new cancer medicines are associated with small benefits. These newer medicines have staggering economic implications; this needs to be reconciled with the fact that there are patients in all health systems who lack access to core cancer treatments with large benefits. This lecture will explore themes of value, access, magnitude of benefit, and time toxicity in modern oncology and offer thoughts on how we can improve the delivery of cancer care.

Video

05.05.2022 

Diarmaid McDonald
Patients and patient groups are playing an increasingly prominent role in decision making at many steps of the drug development and rollout process. Their role has been particularly high profile in debates around NICE appraisals of highly priced medicines, as they attempt to influence the outcome of a process that determines whether or not they can access a potentially life-changing drug on the NHS. Just Treatment, a patient-led campaign group, has attempted to intervene in these disputes in a way that generates scrutiny of the wider causes of the problem, and builds pressure for systemic reform of government and pharmaceutical industry behaviour. What has the historic role of patients in these disputes been, how is that role evolving, and what does the future hold?

For this talk Diarmaid will be joined by a patient leader who has participated in their campaign work, and has been directly affected by the consequences of high medicine prices.

Video | Slides

19.05.2022

Elad Sharon, MD, MPH
The discussion will focus on the National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Therapy Evaluation Program.  The mission of the Cancer Therapy Evaluation Program (CTEP) is to improve the lives of cancer patients by finding better ways to treat, control and cure cancer. CTEP accomplishes this mission by funding an extensive national program of cancer research and by sponsoring clinical trials to evaluate new anti-cancer agents, with a particular emphasis on translational research to elucidate molecular targets and mechanisms of drug effects.  This will serve as an example of the United States government’s involvement in promoting cancer research and developing novel therapies, in collaboration with industry and academia.

Video | Slides

16.06.2022

Jack Scannell, PhD
Successful drug discovery is like finding oases of safety and efficacy in chemical and biological deserts. Disease models, and other decision tools used in drug R&D, point towards oases when they score therapeutic candidates in a way that correlates with clinical utility in humans. Otherwise, they generally lead in the wrong direction. This line of thought can be quantified using the idea of ‘predictive validity,’ or the correlation coefficient between the output of a disease model and clinical utility across therapeutic candidates. History and decision theory both suggest that predictive validity is under-managed in drug R&D, not least because it is so hard to measure before projects succeed or fail later in the process. This talk explains the influence of predictive validity on R&D productivity and discusses methods to evaluate and improve it.

07.07.2022

• What is a fake measurement tool and how are they used in RCT
• The End of the “Syndrome” in Critical Care

Video | Slides | Transcript

22.09.2022

Jaume Vidal
The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated that the tensions between intellectual property (IP) rights and access to life-saving technologies remain well after the Doha Declaration. Despite the hefty words and good intentions of governments in the Global North, misuse and abuse of patent-based exclusive rights and other IP protection measures hinder access to innovation and greatly limit policy space for governments in the time of need.

As the discussions and debate around the TRIPS waiver for COVID-related health goods have shown, there is a new political appetite among governments in the Global South governments to revisit some of the main tenets of global IP protection framework to ensure that tech transfer and greater access to innovation are effectively fulfilled. Despite the disappointing result of the 18-month effort by over 50 governments, with the support of civil society and academy, the issue is back in the agenda and specific steps need to be taken in the short term to bring necessary change to fruition. This talk looks at the background and context of the IP and public health balance and identifies possible actions for the short, mid and long term to make sure that, in the next pandemic, artificial scarcity of health technologies does not leave anyone behind.

06.10.2022

Sir Andrew Dillon
NICE was never a counsel of perfection. It was always - and still is - a work in progress. Its development was never fast enough for many and for some, not always in the right direction. Its heart was always in the right place, though and it did its best to learn from its mistakes, as well as from the advice it received from its friends and critics (it’s possible to be both, of course). This talk is just one take on what was learned along the way, during NICE’s first two decades, by someone who saw it happen and survived.

Video | Slides | Transcript

20.10.2022

Edzard Ernst, MD, Ph.D

Alternative medicine is a vast and controversial subject. Research into alternative medicine has substantially increased during recent years. Yet, important questions remain unanswered. One reason for this phenomenon might be the often-lamentable lack of research integrity that seems to plague alternative medicine.

Video | Slides | Transcript

10.11.2022 5pm

John Hickman, Valerie Jentzsch, Jack Scannell, Leeza Osipenko

01.12.2022 5pm BST

Nathan I Cherny MBBS, FRACP, FRCP
How good are oncology drugs? Which ones should be used and which ones should not? Who should decide and how? ESMO (European Society for Medical Oncology) Magnitude of Clinical Benefit Scale
(MCBS) is a tool for assisting in prioritization of medicines in cancer care. This talk by Professor Cherny presents an overview of ESMO-MCBS and its multiple uses in public policy, the clinic and research
design.
More information about the tool: https://www.esmo.org/guidelines/esmo-mcbs

Video | Slides | Transcript.

15.12.2022 5pm.

Florian Naudet, MD, PhD

For long, fraud in biomedical research was seen as an infrequent problem. It is no longer the case. While rare frauds in the past often involved falsification of data by isolated centers within a study, today fraud can involve entirely invented trials, the so-called ‘Zombie trials’. Zombie trials are “randomised controlled trials that appear to be false and those where the data lack credibility so blatantly that they can be called ‘Zombies’". In this talk I will describe two zombie trials about Artemisia tea infusions effectiveness including one in Malaria. I will then provide an overview of the problem with numerous other examples.

Video | Slides | Transcript