Pharmaceuticals and Society

John Abraham has supervised numerous doctoral students and post-doctoral researchers in the field of ‘pharmaceuticals & society’ from the early 1990s to the present. His doctoral students and post-doctoral researchers have worked across a wide range of topics, including pharmaceutical safety and efficacy regulation, international harmonization of pharmaceutical scientific standards, pharmaceuticalization and medicalization, globalization of pharmaceutical governance, pharmaceutical prescribing, drug industry promotion and marketing strategies, pharmaceutical pricing, and cost-effectiveness assessment of pharmaceuticals. Much of this work, supervised by John, has been international and/or internationally comparative, including the UK, US, Sweden, Germany, France, Hungary, Czech Republic, Romania, and South Africa.

John has also created, designed, convened, taught, and assessed a postgraduate Master’s course in ‘Pharmaceuticals & Society’ at King’s College London for almost a decade since 2013 during which he delivered 12 lectures and 12 seminars each year. From 2013 onwards, John designed the course to cover the following material:

Structure and development of the pharmaceutical industry
The Process of Pharmaceutical Innovation and Drug Development
The Nature of Pharmaceutical Regulation: Theories and Evidence
Medicalization, Pharmaceuticalization and the ‘Medical-Industrial Complex’
Case Studies of Pharmaceutical Safety Controversies
AIDS, Patient Activism and the ‘Patient-Industrial Complex’
Surrogate Efficacy, Clinical Trial Design, and Therapeutic Advance
Pricing Regulation and Financialization of the Pharmaceutical Industry
Cost-Effectiveness Assessment and Health-Care Systems
Globalisation of Pharmaceutical Governance
Access to Essential Medicines