Dilip Shanghvi Quotes

I agree, the world would be a better place if doctors were less enthusiastic about adopting very new drugs.

The Food and Drug Administration works to protect the interests of all patients and provide them with reliable information about the potential effects of treatments. But government rules should not stand in the way of potentially lifesaving therapies for those who do not have much time or any other options.

The very first pharmaceutical commercial I ever heard was 15 seconds of the product and 45 seconds of side effects, so I know that this cannot be good for you.

When you prescribe a new drug, often you are prescribing something that has only been tested in a few thousand people for a very short period of time, perhaps only six months, and that's not long enough to know whether there are any medium- or long-term side effects.

Well, because lots of questions had been raised about the toxicity of the drug, which is very serious.

To get discounts on some drugs, private insurers are willing to pay top prices for blockbuster pharmaceuticals like Vioxx, despite the fact that Vioxx was rumored to cause fatal strokes and heart attacks.

The public properly relies upon FDA classification of drugs as nonprescription as a reflection of the agency's judgment regarding the safety and proper use of a drug without a doctor's prescription.

When the FDA forces an old drug off the market, patients have very little say in the matter. Patients have even less of a say when the FDA chooses not to approve a new drug. Instead, we are supposed to rely on the FDA's judgment and be grateful. But can the FDA really make a choice that is appropriate for everyone? Of course not.

There's a certain libertarian right-wing view that there should be no FDA, that people can decide for themselves whether medicines are safe and effective. That's nonsense. Most people don't have the expertise or the resources to mount a proper study to find out whether a treatment is safe or effective.

We should look for ways to expedite generic drug approvals, particularly for products that have a long history of being safe and effective.

People have the right to know the drugs they are taking will make them better instead of harming them.

Rushing blindly towards unproven drugs can be disastrous and result in countless more deaths.

The problem we are trying to solve is that of drugs that would have never seen the light of day for reasons that have nothing to do with the inherent properties of drug candidates themselves and more to do with bureaucratic institutions within which they often sit.

To start with, pharma was an industry based on innovation, drug discovery.

On the third stage is used for medicine, it is not known to the public.

The public relies on the advice of doctors and leading researchers. The public has a right to know about financial relationships between those doctors and the drug companies who make the pharmaceuticals prescribed by doctors.

Would-be drug companies must either produce medicines that stand up to federal scrutiny, demonstrate that their data has value to other companies, or go out of business.

Now, what tends to happen is that the stories get hyped. And the medicines are not quite as revolutionary and as dramatic as they seem to be. But, certainly, various phases of this problem are being attacked by the pharmaceutical companies.

In general, drug companies are reasonably good at developing new treatments, and there's also a lot of good in the industry.

I keep encouraging the pharmaceutical companies to put more money into R&D.

If you go to the FDA with a drug that's only meant to treat 50 people, and it's a 95 percent cure rate, you'll get your drug approved.

The need to understand prescription information can literally be a matter of life and death.

If you sit in a position where decisions that you take would have a serious effect on people, you can't ignore a lot of experience around the world which says this drug has these negative effects.

Drug discovery is terribly expensive, just to find out how one drug could or could not work and all its side effects.

Our ad campaign with Pfizer is educational. Lipitor is the most widely prescribed drug in the country. For every prescription, there is a doctor writing it. It's a huge vote of confidence.