Articles by Cristina Falcão

Globally, commercial goods, pharmaceutical, biomedical/biologics including commercial and military aerospace industries all experience product infiltration with unknown, non-genuine, stylish imitation, countless after-market knock-offs. Within these mentioned applications, the basic method of applying an adhered seal is lacking and insufficient as the seal is quite easily substituted or...Full Article »

Today’s supply chain companies demand a near perfect order record to reduce the cost of labor, transportation and errors within their distribution centers. We interviewed Tom Napier from PSI Engineering, which provides tailored products to the pharma industry.Their systems not only reduce costs, but also helpfight counterfeiting and secure the integrity of the...Full Article »

It is pretty amazing how, with only one strike, the pharmacy logistics of an entire country knocked out all the reimbursement schemes and it took two years to understand the problem and try to fix it to some extent. I was so fascinated by this mystery that I decided to investigate and published my conclusions some years back. I will use the Portuguese example although this one is very similar to...Full Article »

The Portuguese university degrees are among the best in the world and the pharmaceutical sciences one is probably the best; upon graduating we are ready to work in the industry, pharmacy, hospital, labs, and so on, and that is why recruiters come from all places to recruit Portuguese pharmacists. First, it is important to point the major differences between English speaking countries’...Full Article »

In times of global recession pharma industry was not immune to the direct and indirect effects of the economic crisis. It is not just about dry pipelines and skyrocketing R&D costs; it is also about the profound changes in global healthcare systems. Aging populations, the rise of chronic disease and demand for improved health care, the expensiveness of innovation, the pressures from...Full Article »

A paradigm is the conceptual framework upon which we build our world; it is built upon past experiences; if we are not willing to make shifts in our paradigms, we will remain stagnate in our growth; a paradigm shift is a change from one way of thinking to another; it is something that does not happen like self generation it is driven by change. Culture change is not simply about how we see...Full Article »

In spite of all the scientific and technology advances, the 21 st  century generation may be the first generation to not outlive their parents. Obesity has reached epidemic proportions globally, with more than 1 billion adults overweight - at least 300 million of them clinically obese - and is a major contributor to the global burden of chronic disease and disability. Often coexisting,...Full Article »

Medical device growth is outpacing pharma industry. Europe accounts for about 30% of world revenues for medical equipment, the regulations for translation of medical devices in the EU affect a large portion of global device distribution; there are challenges in translation and communicating science in a multilingual world dominated by the de facto language of English. The EU alone has 23 mother...Full Article »

There is a time and the time is now and is right for me… (1) Welcome to the age of personalized medicine. With the mapping of the entire human genome, completed in 2003, many doors were unlocked and one of them was personalized medicine – prescription of tailored drugs and therapies based on our specific genetic code. The key benefits of PM (Personalized Medicine) are better...Full Article »

The patient is the most important stakeholder in healthcare. Every day patients are questioning their treatment options and making product choices through their own research. With orphan diseases,  experience, information and treatment can often be hard for the patient and their caregivers to come by. In this article Pharma IQ highlights the patient's perspective of...Full Article »

Economies of scale come in many flavors. Including the oddity flavor where the number of manufactured products decreases and the size of markets shrink. Orphan drugs are economies of scale’ oddity flavor – a smaller market is as profitable as a large one, as long as the expensive therapies fall into reimbursement plans, in other words, as long as there are diagnostic tests...Full Article »