Pharma Industry Archive

It must be awful to work at the FDA right now. There you are, sitting in your cubicle, trying to make sure the pharmaceutical industry cures more people than it kills. But every five minutes some investigator from the Government Accountability Office calls you into the conference room for a “word” about how you do your job. Perhaps not every five minutes, but that’s what it...

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Half a dozen drug companies are simultaneously pursuing anti-obesity pills. The WSJ summarizes these efforts, but doesn’t mention that Pfizer also has an anti-obesity drug in late-stage development that was expected to see daylight in 2009. But the estimated launch date for the drug, currently known only as CP-945598, has been pushed back to 2011. With America’s obesity problem getting...

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In what is becoming a sadly common ritual, Wyeth and Elan are pressing forward with an expensive, large-scale “phase III” trial of a risky drug based on wishful thinking and shoddy statistical analysis. The drug in question is bapineuzumab, a monoclonal antibody intended to treat Alzheimer’s disease by clearing the protein beta amyloid from the brain. Beta amyloid is often...

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Given all the trauma the drug industry is currently going through, you can hardly blame executives for cutting costs wherever they can. Unsurprisingly, outsourcing is a big part of Big Pharma’s repair toolkit these days. Pfizer, for instance, says that 17 percent of its manufacturing and active ingredients are currently outsourced, and that it plans to boost that to 30 percent in the next...

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It’s not just layoffs anymore. The market-research firm Industrial Info Resources notes in a recent report that pharma plans to shutter 26 plants and research facilities across North America, in addition to the tens of thousands of sales reps, scientists and manufacturing-plant workers big drugmakers are letting go. Those closures also follow the shutdown (or notification thereof) of 77...

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A quick recap of major deals in the week that was, with a big hat tip to the In Vivo Blog: Obviously, the big kahuna of the week was Roche’s $43.7 billion bid for Genentech. But Roche wasn’t close to finished: The Swiss drugmaker also paid C$191 million ($189.3 million) for the Canadian biotech Arius Research, a developer of antibody-screening systems, and $125 million for Mirus...

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A quick roundup of recent developments in Roche’s dramatic $44 billion bid takeover bid for Genentech: Genentech established a committee of three “independent” directors to evaluate the Roche bid. The especially odd thing here is that one of them is Genentech’s co-founder Herbert Boyer. I’m sure Boyer somehow fits the definition of “independent” for...

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Everyone seems to be ganging up on high drug prices these days. In two separate hearings last week, Congressional committees took after drugmakers for big markups on specialty treatments and a pharma “windfall” created by the Medicare prescription-drug benefit, while the WSJ took a hard look at the opacity of drug pricing via pharmacy-benefit managers. All these stories have a...

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Roche’s $44 billion bid for the 44 percent of Genentech it doesn’t already own marks the end of an era in a number of ways. Genentech, the world’s oldest biotech, is a remarkable symbol of the industry’s success at turning innovative science into bestselling drugs. For it to vanish inside Roche much the way Chiron disappeared into Novartis a few years ago would be more...

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For all its rhetoric about advancing human health, the drug industry has never shown much interest in tropical diseases that kill or plague millions of people, for the very simple reason that poor nations can’t pay top dollar for new drugs. That may be changing, though, thanks to a new federal program that rewards companies who get drugs approved for malaria, tuberculosis and similar...

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