Pharma Industry Archive

For the past few years, a coterie of biotech executives, desperate patients and ideologues have waged a low-level but steady campaign to convince the country that the Food and Drug Administration is condemning sick Americans to death by denying them potentially life-saving cancer drugs and other treatments. For all three, it’s a no-brainer: Biotechs want their drugs approved faster, under...

More...

Express Scripts, a big “pharmacy benefit management,” or PBM, provider, yesterday agreed to pay $9.5 million in order to settle looming state lawsuits centered on allegations that it monkeyed with patient prescriptions in order to reap bigger rebates from drugmakers. The payment, of course, is a mere slap on the wrist to Express, which claims to handle prescriptions for 50 million...

More...

Forbes’ Matthew Herper and Michael Maiello have just jumped on a subject we alluded to — perhaps too obliquely — a few weeks back in discussing the eye-popping $30 million Schering-Plough CEO Fred Hassan pulled down in 2007. Not only did Schering post a $1.5 billion loss that year, it also sat on negative clinical-trial results that eventually crushed sales of its cholesterol...

More...

The rise of the modern pharmaceutical industry is closely intertwined with the advent of “direct-to-consumer” advertising — those ubiquitous TV and magazine ads for antidepressants, sleep aids, erectile-dysfunction drugs and a whole slew of other treatments. In fact, it’s hard to imagine how the industry could ever have grown to its current size without them, given the...

More...

Johnson & Johnson might have had better luck had it decided to introduce a line of baby itching powder or Band-Aids guaranteed to make the “ouch” even worse. As it stands, though, its decision last August to sue the Red Cross over use of the instantly recognizable symbol they both share has turned out to be a near-perfect disaster in its own right. Late last week, a federal...

More...

Short of planting a mole, there are few better ways to look into an industry’s id than by reading its trade press. And according to those who track pharma most closely — at times almost sycophantically — one of the industry’s major preoccupations these days is… meetings. Not just any meetings, though. Apparently drug-company get-togethers — which can range...

More...

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

More...

Merrill Goozner, a former Chicago Tribune reporter turned public-health advocate (he heads up the Integrity in Science Project at the Center for Science in the Public Interest), notes an interesting and almost wholly overlooked Food and Drug Administration decision that may have the effect of subjecting clinical-trial volunteers in poor nations to unwarranted risks. Assuming his take is...

More...

The Vytorin scandal just got serious. Well, heck, it was already serious. Make this really serious: Investigation and Inquiries.  Through the date of filing this 10-Q, Schering-Plough, the joint venture and/or its joint venture partner, Merck, have received a number of governmental inquiries and have been the subject of a number of investigations. These include...

More...

For sudden twists of fate, abrupt collapses and the occasional stunning revival, it’s hard to beat the biotech industry. Yesterday, for instance, the all-but-dead biotech VaxGen agreed to sell off its ailing anthrax vaccine to its East Coast rival Emergent BioSolutions –a company that spent much of this decade trying to lobby VaxGen out of existence. Formerly known as BioPort,...

More...