Chandigarh, February 23
Prof J.D. Wig, Head, Department of General Surgery, PGI, has been awarded the Medical Council of India Silver Jubilee Research Award for the year 2005 in the category of “Outstanding work in the field of medical and allied sciences done in India”.
He has earlier received the B.C. Roy Award in the category of eminent medical teacher; the Pfizer Oration Award of the Indian Society of Gastroenterology for contribution to gastroenterology; the Col Sangam Lal Memorial Oration Award of the National Academy of Medical Sciences; the Dr P.K. Sen Memorial Oration Award; the Dr Das Mahapatra Oration Award of the Association of Surgeons of India, among others. He is a member of many national and international scientific societies.
Pharmacology meet: The fourth day of the XXIV National Workshop on Clinical Pharmacology started with a lecture by Dr P.L. Sharma, Emeritus professor, Department of Pharmacology, PGI, on cost benefit consideration in new drug development.
He said: “The process of new drug development is extremely expensive and up to $ one billion may be spent. If carried out in India, the cost could be reduced by one-fifth to one-tenth. Increasingly, Indian companies are entering the new drug development programmes.”
Dr Shekhar Potkar, Director-Clinical Research from Pfizer, spoke on the regulatory aspects of clinical trials. He said the new Schedule Y of the Indian Drugs and Cosmetic Act had been released last year.
He also spoke on international regulatory issues in the field of clinical trials. He stressed that the regulations were getting more and more stringent and the investigators must be very careful while conducting clinical trials. The responsibilities of the investigators and the sponsors had been well described in various guidelines and should be followed.
With increasing number of therapeutic options becoming available, the importance and nuances of quality of life clinical trials was discussed by Prof P. Khosla, Head, Department of Pharmacology, CMC, Ludhiana.
He said “Merely evaluating the safety and efficacy of new drugs is not sufficient in all cases. It is important that the impact of drugs on patients’ quality of life must also be evaluated. There are well-validated methods of evaluation of quality of life and they should be used to measure patients’ quality of life.”
In his second lecture, Prof Khosla stressed the need for physicians, practitioners, scientists and students to critically evaluate published scientific literature. He explained that pharmaceutical companies may try to mislead readers by writing in medical journals.
“They can often take the help of complicated statistical methods which practitioners do not understand. The positive effects of the drugs are highlighted whereas the negative ones are hidden. Therefore, careful evaluation of this published material is of paramount importance,” he added.
