Pharma Industry Archive

Over the past few years, a rise in counterfeit versions of name-brand drugs has generated a fair amount of concern within government and the drug industry. (The growing scandal over tainted heparin, while a separate issue, hasn’t helped.) And yet drugmakers have balked at current plans to track genuine drugs from factory to pharmacy. So it’s no surprise that Congress is now thinking...

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Wonder no further whether the recent litany of drug-safety problems would make the Food and Drug Administration more cautious about approving new drugs. In just the past four days, the agency has thrown some serious sand into the industry’s drug-development works, delaying or derailing three separate programs of widely varying merit. Consider: Earlier today, the FDA told Merck that its...

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By some reports, direct-to-consumer (DTC) drug advertising is beginning to stagnate — a trend suggested by Sepracor’s recent decision to cut back on TV spots involving its Lunesta moth. Stepping into the breach: More direct-marketing advertising, particularly involving the Internet. According to a recent report from the Direct Marketing Association, which admittedly has a vested...

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Since I’ve just spend close to a half-hour flipping through Big Pharma proxy filings, I figured I’d take just a little longer and put together a quick table of the best-paid chief executives in pharma and biotech. Enjoy. The following data is all taken from 2007 proxy statements issued by the industry’s largest U.S. companies; I’ve linked to the proxies in the following...

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Schering-Plough has had a fairly miserable year so far, thanks to its apparent efforts to keep bad scientific news about the cholesterol pill Vytorin out of the public eye. CEO Fred Hassan, however, is still living off last year’s glory — even if it might well have been far less glorious had Schering and its partner Merck published that Vytorin study promptly. As it stands, though,...

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A close reading of the Merck and Schering-Plough first-quarter conference calls suggests that Merck is distancing itself from its joint-venture partner — who is, in any event, in a much worse position to weather the storm over their cholesterol-fighting pill Vytorin. Vytorin, of course, is a combination of Merck’s generic statin Zocor and Schering’s newer cholesterol drug...

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You can’t fault GlaxoSmithKline for temerity. The U.K. drugmaker’s unexpectedly large $720 million bid for Sirtris Pharmaceuticals represents a gutsy bet that the Massachusetts biotech really has a handle on a class of drugs that slow aging. Not that anyone at either company is eager to describe their work that way, of course. Late in 2006, Sirtris got a big boost when a team led by...

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The Food and Drug Administration rejected Genzyme’s request to sell a version of its drug Myozyme made in a new factory, a decision some journalists and bloggers insist on casting as a black mark against the very notion of generic biotech drugs. There’s just one problem: These folks have it exactly backward. First, some backstory. Genzyme initially won FDA approval for Myozyme, a...

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The pharma blogosphere is buzzing about what appears to be a new “guerilla marketing” campaign for the over-the-counter allergy drug Zyrtec. According to one blogger in Boston and another in New York, many of these seemingly handwritten flyers have been seen taped to telephone poles, scaffolds and other post-like structures over the past week. (Click on the image at left for a...

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GlaxoSmithKline’s willingness to bet up to $600 million on a tiny biotech called Regulus Therapeutics kicks off the latest pharma land grab — this one for treatments that rely on tiny molecules called microRNAs, or miRNAs for short. New drug technologies — or “modalities,” as the industry terms them — bloom like perennials in this industry, and often fade...

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