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I have spent the past few days in Berlin at the Second Annual Digital Pharma ExL Conference. It was a notable get-together for a number of reasons, including presenters who were extremely knowledgeable and understanding of both the potential of social media, and of the realities that must be faced both externally and internally in its use by a highly regulated industry like the medical products industry.

OpenQ announces the general release of openSpend, an integrated information, service and software solution for managing and reporting aggregate spend. The company will be officially launching the product while sponsoring ExL Pharma’s Tracking & Reporting Aggregate Spend Conference taking place January 12-13, 2010 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Washington DC.

This week was full and frantically busy, and I am not just talking about the three days I drove back and forth to Bridgewater, N.J., for ExL Pharma’s Digital Pharma conference (if you want the quick lowdown on what happened there, you can find the Tweets, from me and many others, under the hashtag #DigPharm). This week, AstraZeneca offered a buyout to all of its sales representatives (and Pharmalot broke the news); Pfizer started handing out layoffs to most of the former Wyeth sales force; FDA sent a warning letter to King Pharmaceuticals over two video news releases about the pain drug Embeda; the Government Accountability Office released a report that says FDA doesn’t debar researchers quickly enough when they have been found to have conflicts of interest (another hat tip here to Ed Silverman and Pharmalot); FDA has delayed its decision on whether to approve Amgen’s denosumab; and drugmakers were found to be the biggest contributors to the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

After a short vacation in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Shenandoah National Park (see my photos on Flickr here), I was feeling disconnected from my homies in the pharma marketing social media hood. So, yesterday, I got in my whip and went cruising for ExL Pharma's 3rd Annual Digital Pharma "un" conference in Bridgewater, NJ.