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"Keeping Massachusetts Competitive" by Robert Coughlin

The majority of our members are directly engaged in the research, development and manufacturing of innovative products that solve the unmet medical needs of patients around the world. We are committed to ensuring that our members in the industry live up to their utmost potential.

We are equally committed to Massachusetts and its overall success. Accordingly, we applaud the Governor, the Legislature and the work thus far of the Life Sciences Center in recognizing the need to invest in the industry that has positioned the state to continue as the leader, not only in the U.S., but globally. Because of our world-class academic institutions, teaching hospitals and innovative companies, we have been fortunate to benefit from a concentration of these companies that represent jobs and multiply into economic benefits for the region.

While we commend the DPH for their efforts to draft regulations for the implementation of the Gift Disclosure law, it contains many ambiguities that we feel still need to be addressed in the regulations.

We support the concept of transparency between physicians and manufacturers’ sales representatives. Industry leaders have worked over the past several years on the issue of transparency, redrafting their respective codes of conduct for sales and marketing, making them much more stringent and transparent. Most companies have their own stricter internal policies that they must follow.

The DPH proposed regulations will be the most stringent and the most costly to monitor and implement in the entire U.S. This could affect the Commonwealth’s ability to attract and grow life science companies, and could very well cause us to lose some of the significant momentum we gathered from the passage of the Life Science Initiative.

Robert Coughlin
President and CEO of the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council

This program aired on January 8, 2009. The audio for this program is not available.

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