The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 275 No 7356 p7
2 July 2005

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OTC industry is drowning in regulation, says PAGB

Pharmaceutical companies and the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency are drowning in a sea of regulation that they are powerless to deal with. So said Bron Gorny, president of the Proprietary Association of Great Britain, at the association’s annual dinner in London last week.

“Our regulatory problems lie with the sheer workload — the current one and the work that the new [European] pharmaceutical directives will generate,” he said.

Appealing to the MHRA to do something about its marketing authorisations backlog, Mr Gorny added: “Even before this new workload hits, we know that the MHRA has a backlog which is set to get worse over the summer as staff are taken out for training on a new computer system.”

The MHRA amounted to a successful company, the PAGB president went on. Without any marketing expenditure, it had a product for which there was unlimited demand and for which price was not an issue.

“To a PAGB company the answer is simple — go out and get a lot more staff. This is not a short-term problem; a bit of overtime will not solve it,” he warned.