Search

The tobacco industry's involvement in the electronic cigarette research that informs public health policy is controversial. On the one hand, some are concerned that their involvement presents conflicts of interest that bias research outputs and invalidate the policies that use them. On the other hand, some have argued that the tobacco industry may support valid research and contribute to the goals of public health, for instance, if the interests of the e‐cigarette industry could be part of a tobacco smoking cessation policy. We approach this debate from the ethical perspective of the public interest and the public good, considering how legitimate researchers can square their expert opinion with validating tobacco industry‐funded research, given the perfidy of the tobacco industry and paucity of robust, conclusive evidence on the public health impacts of liberalizing e‐cigarette use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The calls for health research to be collaborative are ubiquitous-even as part of a recent World Health Assembly resolution on clinical trials-yet the arguments in support of collaborative research have been taken for granted and are absent in the literature. This article provides three arguments to justify why health research ought to be collaborative and discusses trade-offs to be considered among the ethical values guiding each argument., Competing Interests: Competing interests: None declared., (© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2024. Re-use permitted under CC BY. Published by BMJ.)

We examined whether access to US-approved orphan drugs in Canada has changed between 1997 (when Canada chose not to adopt an orphan drug policy) and 2012 (when Canada reversed its policy decision). Specifically, we looked at two dimensions of access to US-approved orphan drugs in Canada: (1) regulatory access; and (2) temporal access. Whereas only 63% of US-approved orphan drugs were granted regulatory approval in 1997, we found that regulatory access to US-approved orphan drugs in Canada increased to 74% between 1997 and 2012. However, temporal access to orphan drugs is slower in Canada: in a head-on comparison of 40 matched drugs, only two were submitted and four were approved first in Canada; moreover, the mean review time in Canada (423 days) was longer than that in the US (mean = 341 days), a statistically significant difference (t[39] = 2.04, p = 0.048). These results raise questions about what motivated Canada's apparent shift in orphan drug policy., (Copyright © 2016 Longwoods Publishing.)