Pharma Industry Archive

Schering-Plough CEO Fred Hassan stands to receive a potential $59 million payout in his company’s merger with Merck, according to a filing with the SEC. The golden parachute comes as the new Merck-Schering entity prepares for $3.5 billion in job cuts and other efficiencies. In Schering’s 2008 proxy statement, the company described its agreement with Hassan should control of the...

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The producer of an NPR radio show has accused the show’s host, Fred Goodwin, of breaking his contract by failing to disclose his ties to drug companies. The producer also denies that Peter Pitts, a former FDA official and an executive at Manning, Selvage & Lee, a PR firm that represents pharmaceutical companies, informed producers of his financial ties to drug companies when he...

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UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal reports that the boards of Genentech and Roche are “near an agreement” on a $95 a share bid. What are we to make of Roche’s new $93 per share offer for Genentech? BNET previously suggested that market conditions were so rough that Genentech holders should take the low-ball $86.50 offer that Roche made when it went hostile a few weeks ago. Looks...

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The top five executives at Merck took home $36 million in compensation last year. All received cash bonuses of between $563,767 and $2.2 million even though two of them had “below-target performance,” according to a Merck filing with the SEC. They also got to use the corporate jet, and so did their wives. The largesse came despite the fact that Merck’s sales declined 3 percent...

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Gilead learned a lesson about the internet this week, namely that everything on it lives forever. Gilead received a warning letter from the FDA citing “false or misleading” statements about pulmonary hypertension drug Letairis made by one of its representatives at a medical conference. The letter was dated Feb. 27, but the incident it refers to was on June 20, 2008: On Friday, June...

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UPDATE: A Pfizer spokesperson says the reports of an impending settlement are “not accurate” but talks are “ongoing.” (Adds in bold.) Pfizer is close to settling the Trovan litigation in Nigeria, and may have whittled the plaintiffs down to as little as $75 million, according to Africa News. But Pfizer representative Chris Loder tells BNET “those stories are not...

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Sanofi-Aventis has installed a 20-foot long, walk-through model of a human colon in NYC’s Times Square (see video). The stunt is to promote colon exams for the middle aged and Sanofi’s Eloxatin, for which the FDA added a colon cancer approval in February. The red plastic model has all the usual features and horrors one might expect. Viewers get to see a bulging cancer, healthy colon...

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Direct-to-consumer drug advertising has almost no relationship with consumer demand for prescriptions. That is one interpretation of a story in Ad Age showing that scrips for insomnia pills (such as Sanofi-Aventis’s Ambien CR) and antidepressants (such as Eli Lilly’s Cymbalta) are up, even though advertising in both those categories is on the decline. The drug business has always...

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More bad news for Procter & Gamble Pharmaceuticals: a study review found that its sex-drive-enhancer for women, Intrinsa, doesn’t work and its safety record is in doubt. This will not reflect well on Noven, which last year entered a partnership with P&G to boost the packaged-goods company’s pipeline with another would-be female Viagra, a low-dose testosterone patch. Although...

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There are three interesting things about the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling against Wyeth’s preemption claim. (The case was about whether the FDA preempts state courts from ruling on drug safety.) First, Chief Justice John Roberts took part in the decision even though he owns Pfizer stock (Pfizer just bought Wyeth and thus gives him in a financial interest in the decision). Second, the...

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