Pharma Industry Archive

Congress is probing the dubious award by the FDA of a $300,000 public relations contract to Qorvis Communications. The legislators will have a lot of reading to do, because the Qorvis name is synonymous with controversy, having been allegedly linked to the Saudi Arabian government, a “foreign agent” investigation, Haiti, and a conflict of interest with drug company lobbyists. In the...

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Pharmalot and the Wall Street Journal both used outdated information in items they published on Merck’s Gardasil today. That’s a shame, because having accurate, up-to-date information is crucial in sorting fact from squeamishness about the controversial HPV vaccine that is now mandatory for many schoolgirls. The WSJ and Pharmalot pointed to this opinion article in the Journal of...

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Amylin cuts 340 jobs — The San Diego-based company, whose diabetes drug Byetta has seen slow sales due to safety concerns, will lose approximately one quarter of its workforce. [Source: PharmaTimes] UBS predicts trouble for Sanofi — According to the firm’s analysts, 86% of the current sales of Sanofi-Aventis products will be exposed to generic competition by 2014, and the drug...

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The bleeding risks of Eli Lilly’s new blood thinner, prasugrel, are less clear than the company thinks, according to a Cedars Sinai cardiologist. The drug — which Lilly hopes will be huge — is currently under review by the FDA but has suffered a series of delays that have set back its expected approval date by months. The news adds to the suggestion that Lilly’s...

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Some of the nation’s most important pharmaceutical beat journalists are bad at revealing the conflicts of interest that their sources have when they talk about drugs, according to a Columbia Journalism Review article by Merrill Goozner. The story will appear here (it’s not currently online) but for an advance peak, click here. Goozner alleges that reporters routinely rely on doctors...

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Highly encouraging results on AZ’s Crestor — AstraZeneca announced the results of its much-discussed Jupiter study at the annual meeting of the American Heart Association. Crestor reduced by 44% the risk of cardiovascular death and heart attacks in at-risk individuals, among other encouraging results. The news could be big for Crestor sales, though CEO David Brennan said it was...

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With a new president and a Democrat-controlled Congress, lobbyists are already contemplating a scenario in which the drug business either loses or gives up the right to advertise its products to consumers. Such a move would be dramatic, ending a brief, wild decade of animated toenail fungus monsters and warnings of four-hour erections on TV. But companies may have to do it in order to fight...

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Amgen wants to market its new twice-yearly osteoporosis injection, denosumab, without a massive sales force. Instead, the company said it wants to rely more heavily on the internet. The move will produce an interesting experiment that tests whether companies really need heavy sales forces to sell blockbuster drugs (the company expects denosumab to earn $1 billion-plus in revenues annually). For...

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GSK and Roche to overtake Pfizer by 2012? – A report from URCH Publishing is predicting that Pfizer will lose its top-place market share (currently 6.2%) to GlaxoSmithKline, and will in fact slip to third, behind Roche. The rationale for the projection comes from the consideration of pipelines and patents, among other factors. [Source: FiercePharma] Canadian patent ruling helps Sanofi...

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President Barack Obama’s new chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, is turning out to be Big Pharma’s worse nightmare. He twice put out press releases backing the crusade of Peter Rost, the former Pfizer vp turned whistleblower, in favor of allowing drug reimportation from foreign countries to encourage price competition. (See here and here.) On top of that, Emanuel recently suggested that...

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