The second panel is going on now, moderated by Steve Usdin of BioCentury, and featuring Helen Boucher of Tufts, Frank Burroughs of the Abigail Alliance, Scott Gottleib of the American Enterprise Institute, and Steve Projan of Wyeth.

One subject that's coming up a lot (as it did in the first panel) is the associate of SSRI therapy with suicide (or suicidality). That's a good example of the tricky nature of drug regulation, crossing over from pre-approval to marketed compounds. Some of the earlier panelists (and questioners from the audience) bemoaned the media coverage on the issue - the current panel is talking about it as an example (some parts good, some bad) of how to study ongoing safety issues, with a big problem being who's going to pay for such things. Surveillance, everyone agrees, is probably the best way to get useful data on drugs and their performance in the real world, but (as has been pointed out), no one wants to hear about how that's surely going to drive up drug costs.

Other areas coming up are antibiotics (and the dearth of new ones) and off-label use of cancer therapies (and other drugs) and how much to regulate it.

The conflict between openness and giving lawyers bait to sue everyone is also being discussed - tort reform has been referred to more than once, as you'd figure. The debate about whether you want to report only data that's reached statistical significance has shown up as well (I think that the alternative is chaos, personally, but not everyone agrees).

Steve Projan made a good point about the problems with Ketek (which, as others have noted, haven't had anywhere near the coverage that the Vioxx problems did). As he says, if you drop Ketek and switch to ampicillin, you'll end up killing more people through anaphylactic shock.

Note: post edited after original version, to incorporate more info - DBL