Pharma Industry Archive

Yesterday’s news on Merck’s prolific use of ghostwriters to produce medical-research articles yielded lots of coverage, much of it highly critical. Still, there was a fair bit of cognitive dissonance in the media, which couldn’t seem to decide if Merck’s actions amounted to venial or mortal sins. Nowhere was the gulf wider than between two national, New York-based...

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The drug industry has long thrived on creating “awareness” for new conditions for which it just happens to have a new treatment. With diabetes climbing the charts these days, it was probably only a matter of time before some enterprising marketer hit upon a way to get people clamoring for some related treatment they hadn’t previously known they needed. That day is now here,...

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Some once-friendly ghosts may be getting Merck in trouble all over again. The ethereal beings in question are ghostwriters — the nameless, faceless freelancers paid by drug companies to draft up medical review papers, usually well before they’re even seen by the academic researchers who will eventually put their names on them. Paid ghostwriting of ostensibly independent drug studies...

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As an example of how not to handle a corporate crisis, it’s hard to beat the growing scandal over Vytorin. That’s the blockbuster anti-cholesterol drug whose clinical-trial data Merck and Schering-Plough sat on for a year or two after it showed that Vytorin was apparently no better than a generic statin drug. Now that both House and Senate committees are looking into what Merck and...

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The variety of woes afflicting Big Pharma have led to a spate of well-publicized layoffs, mostly among sales forces — 42,000 since the beginning of 2007, according to one count. Yesterday, Cole Werber at the In Vivo Blog highlighted yet another foreboding statistic: Drugmakers are also starting to trim R&D jobs. Werber implies that pharma is starting to eat its seed corn, since less...

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Well before Vytorin became a cause célèbre — which is to say, about a year ago — GlaxoSmithKline’s Avandia was the drug getting slapped around by critics for, in that case, possible heart problems that had possibly been downplayed or ignored. That case, which led to new warnings on the drug’s label but nothing more drastic beyond a falloff in sales, played a major role...

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The Japanese are coming! Well, to be exact, one Japanese drugmaker, Takeda Pharmaceutical, is coming. And the big question is whether its recent buying spree — capped by its $8.8 billion acquisition of the biotech Millennium Pharmaceuticals announced today — will leave it looking more like Godzilla or one of the unfortunates squashed during the saurian’s rampages through...

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Big Pharma continues to lend new meaning to the phrase “doing more with less,” because while the industry seems to get smaller every day, drugmakers are still pushing through big price increases on their leading products. Over at Pharmalot, Ed Silverman provides a helpful roundup tracking the bloodletting across the industry over the last year or so. (The AP has a similar layoff...

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The saga over Vytorin, the expensive cholesterol pill that may be no better than older, cheaper “statin” drugs, has come to a familiar pass: The manufacturer backlash. Merck and Schering-Plough, the makers of Vytorin, saw their stocks crushed the day after cardiologists trashed the multi-billion-dollar drug at a high-profile medical meeting and recommended doctors downgrade it to a...

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In one of the drug industry’s more revealing scandals in a while, Merck and Schering-Plough are struggling to rescue two new cholesterol drugs from evidence that they’re useless at fighting heart disease and charges that the two companies deliberately sat on the bad news for roughly a year. So far, it’s been a tough sale. But it’s also offered an illuminating look at how...

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