McKinsey & Company, a consulting firm that covers multiple industries including healthcare and life sciences, is under fire for allegedly allowing its employees to work simultaneously for big pharma companies and serve as consultants for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Four leading pharmaceutical companies partnered with Amazon Web Services and Israel Biotech Fund to launch AION Labs, an innovative space that will allow drug developers to harness artificial intelligence technologies and computational science to solve therapeutic challenges.

Merck Chief Executive Officer Kenneth Frazier was named CEO of the Year by Chief Executive magazine for his longtime leadership at the pharmaceutical giant.

President Joe Biden on May 5 threw his support behind waiving intellectual property rights for Covid-19 vaccines, bowing to mounting pressure from Democratic lawmakers and more than 100 other countries, but angering pharmaceutical companies. Biden voiced his support for a waiver – a sharp reversal of the previous U.S. position – in remarks to reporters, followed swiftly by a statement from his top trade negotiator, Katherine Tai, who backed negotiations at the World Trade Organization.

The tenth annual Pharmaceutical Innovation Index, released April 21, sees Eli Lilly top the industry for the first time. The Pharmaceutical Invention Index, a ranking of the industry’s best pipelines, rated Bristol Myers Squibb as No. 1.

Ten Covid-19 vaccines could be available by the middle of 2021 if they win regulatory approval, but their inventors need patent protection, the head of the global pharmaceutical industry group said.

The European Commission wants to make it easier for patients to access cheaper generic medicines, a draft EU document seen by Reuters shows, in a move that could cut the revenues of big pharmaceutical firms.

President Donald Trump signed a new executive order aimed at lowering drug prices in the United States by linking them to those of other nations and expanding the scope of a July 2020 action.

Over the past five years, the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review pressured drugmakers to lower the cost of nearly 100 drugs. ICER aims to play a similar role with emerging Covid-19 treatments and vaccines.

As the COVID-19 pandemic spread around the globe, biopharma companies big and small geared up to test experimental drugs and vaccines or to potentially repurpose approved drugs to fight the disease. Many scaled up manufacturing capabilities for pharmaceutical ingredients, existing compounds, and launched clinical trials. Now companies are asking help paying for it and warn that if governments want these therapies to be rolled out quickly and fairly, it’s going to require significant coordination and upfront funding.