Pharma Industry Archive

UPDATE: An early victory for AstraZeneca. A Florida judge just dismissed the first two cases on motions for summary judgment. So, er … never mind! Next week in Orlando federal court the first of 9,000 lawsuits filed against AstraZeneca’s antipsychotic Seroquel will was to go to trail. The suits allege that AstraZeneca failed to warn patients that side effects of the drug include...

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Abbott Labs laid off 200 drug sales reps after the FDA failed to approve Vicodin CR, a longer lasting version of its generic painkiller. The move explains a puzzle BNET pointed to in Abbott’s Q4 earnings release. On Jan. 21, Abbott reported a 10 percent increase in revenues, but the overall productivity of its sales force declined by nearly 5 percent. How did it manage such a failure when...

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Pfizer and Wyeth: how many jobs are actually being cut? — The Health Blog provides a run-down on the various figures that are being tossed around, from 18,000 to 26,000. Their estimate (with the math to back it up) is 19,425 from the combined company, with at least 8,190 coming from Pfizer alone. [Source: WSJ Health Blog] In merger, desperate biotech companies lose a lifeline —...

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Laurie Magid, the acting U.S. attorney for Pennsylvania’s Eastern District, has written a strongly worded warning to drug companies that they must stop promoting off-label uses for drugs or face the consequences. The warning comes after both Pfizer and Eli Lilly paid record fines for off-label promotion of Zyprexa and Bextra, respectively. Lilly paid $1.4 billion and Pfizer paid $2.3...

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An Australian researcher wrongly told a university ethics committee that Eli Lilly’s Strattera did not have a black box warning label in an application for a trial of the drug in children. At the same time, an Eli Lilly employee was paid to work on the study as an investigator even though parents of children enrolled in the study were told it was “independent” of the drug...

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Amgen’s Q4 results showed, again, how dependent the company is on the FDA coming up with a solid approval for denosumab, its osteoporosis drug. Revenues were down a little bit to $3.6 billion, but expenses ballooned. The revenue yield on its sales dollars collapsed 23 percent from the prior quarter as expenses went up to $1.1 billion. Amgen now gets just $3.31 in revenues for every dollar...

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Some housekeeping notes on the Pfizer-Wyeth merger: The patent cliff remains unfilled, the WSJ reports: … between 2010 and 2015, the combined company’s revenues will drop by $11 billion to $62 billion. Health-care analysis firm Datamonitor estimates that products accounting for 38.5% of Pfizer’s 2007 sales will face generic competition by 2013. With the addition of Wyeth, the...

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Today’s big pharma news is, of course, that Pfizer is buying Wyeth (a story broken by the Wall Street Journal last week) for $60 billion. The deal has seen a flurry of analysis and commentary from the blogosphere; today’s Roundup highlights the best content out there. First, Corey Nahman says he read 25 straight articles about the deal and picked the AP’s first story, from...

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A federal appeals court has strongly suggested that an “Abbott in-house attorney” is a cheat. In a ruling on whether Abbott Labs broke antitrust law in consipiring with generic makers to keep Hytrin, a hypertension and prostate enlargement drug, off the market, the judges described why they were sending the  case back to court for a jury trial. An unnamed, male Abbott in-house...

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Bayer has hired Lo Bosworth, the least-interesting of the cast of MTV’s The Hills, as an endorser and spokeswoman for birth-control pill Yaz. Bosworth, is regarded to have been brought onto the vapid show for the purpose of creating a rift between stars Lauren Conrad and Heidi Montag. The Vancover Sun describes her qualifications as a prescription drug-pusher this way: She’s also...

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