Pharma Industry Archive

Sometimes I come across items that aren’t important enough to count as news but are nonetheless too strange to ignore. Thus, I give you the top 10 weirdest drug stories for August: The connection between O.J. and Preparation H. Ever wonder why the orange juice in your fridge lasts so long? Thank this guy: Dr. Robert George Blank, 79, who died Aug. 24. He was a VP/director of R&D at...

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Bayer could be facing a damaging PR issue if separate legal actions in Washington and Germany unearth evidence that the company’s pesticide division was responsible for “colony collapse disorder,” the unexplained mass death of honeybees worldwide that happened this year and last. Most of the attention that the media and investors pay to pharmaceutical companies gets spent on...

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The current big headache for Eli Lilly and Amylin is their diabetes drug Byetta, which the FDA has linked to six cases of fatal pancreatitis. The two companies, which jointly market the drug, held a conference call yesterday in which they hoped to calm nervous investors. (It had mixed results: Lilly’s stock stayed relatively steady but Amylin’s crashed from $27.24 on Tuesday to...

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Figuring out whether Abbott Laboratories is firing on all cylinders or heading for a wall is a complicated business. On the one hand, the company announced it would lay off 1,000 employees in its diagnostics business. Abbott spokesperson Melissa Brotz said: We are taking this action from a position of strength to improve profitability and competitiveness moving forward, addressing excess...

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Eli Lilly’s Cymbalta is fast adding indications. Today the company announced the results of a trial to see if the drug can be used for back pain and last week it was approved in Europe for generalized anxiety disorder. Its wide variety of uses — Cymbalta is also indicated for fibromylagia, depression, incontinence and diabetic nerve pain — have made the drug a commercial success....

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Yet another company is taking a crack at the “Viagra for women” concept. This time it is Noven Pharmaceuticals, which has licensed its testosterone-based skin patch to Procter & Gamble. The companies did not disclose the terms of the deal. The move is an interesting one for two reasons. First, P&G has already dipped a toe in this market before and largely failed to, um,...

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A handful of scientists are skeptical that Genentech’s C-08 trial of its Avastin anti-cancer drug will show any benefit in preventing the recurrence of colorectal cancer following surgery, reports PharmaWire (via the Financial Times). Avastin is one of Genentech’s most valuable products, and currently rakes in sales of $650 million a quarter. But the drug faces criticism that it is...

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It’s been nearly a month since Roche bid $44 billion to completely buy out Genentech, which seems like a good point at which to ask whether Roche, if successful, could end up destroying the value it’s seeking to acquire. When the bid was announced, there were immediate predictions that Roche was running the risk of overpaying for an office building in San Francisco with a sign that says...

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After years of funneling campaign money to Republican politicians, the drug business has suddenly decided that the Democrats — who took control of Congress in the 2006 elections — will win the White House in the fall. From 1990 until just last year, pharma political campaign contribution money on the federal level went solidly to Republicans over Democrats, sometimes at margins of...

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Fourteen children have now died during a pneumonia vaccine trial run by GlaxoSmithKline in Argentina, according to the U.K.’s Daily Mail. Argentine authorities are investigating. GSK says the deaths are not linked to the tests. This issue first emerged for GSK in July, when TradingMarkets.com reported that 12 babies had died during the trial. GSK has pointed out that 19,000 kids have...

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