The Week That Was in Pharma

Welcome back from the weekend. Here’s a quick roundup of stories you may have overlooked over the past week:

1. Merck said it would cut 1,200 jobs following the FDA’s rejection of one cholesterol drug and a scandal that’s cuts sales of its combination drug Vytorin, which it sells with Schering-Plough. That’s on top of 8,100 jobs it planned to eliminate in a Dec. 2005 restructuring.
2. Embattled Amgen CEO Kevin Sharer told shareholders he’s felt “real economic pain” during the company’s recent travails, in which the FDA and Medicare have beaten up on the company’s core anemia drugs after they were linked to cancer and heart problems. Sharer still earned almost $13.2 million in compensation last year, although that represented a cut of almost 29 percent from his previous year’s paycheck.
3. A private biotech called Novalar Pharmaceuticals won approval for the first drug intended to reverse the effects of dental anesthesia, the NYT reports. The drug doesn’t counteract numbness directly, but does increase blood flow and thus “clears” the anesthetic from patients’ bodies faster. The drug may seem like a needless luxury, but Novalar insists it could be useful for children, who might bite their lips or tongue while numb, or in the cosmetic-dentistry market.
4. Bristol-Myers Squibb sold off a wound-care unit to a private-equity partnership, then said it wants to spin off 10 percent to 20 percent of its baby-formula business in an IPO. Observers are divided as to whether BMS is slimming down to make itself a more attractive acquisition target, or to regain its fighting weight in order to start buying other companies itself.
5. The FDA won’t require new clinical trials for a copycat version of Sanofi-Aventis‘ blood thinner Lovenox, although the generic-version backers –Novartis unit Sandoz and Momenta — still have o provide additional laboratory and animal tests.
6. Congress is once again making noises about banning, or at least dramatically scaling back direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising for new drugs. Lawmakers probed the issue at a House subcommittee hearing last Thursday. New Zealand is the only other industrialized country that allows such ads, which studies have shown play a measureable role in swaying doctors to prescribe brand-name drugs.
7. New drug-industry user fees paid to the FDA will mostly subsidize FDA’s expansion of its own drug-monitoring and inspection system, according to the agency’s draft drug-safety plan.