Pharma Industry Archive

Johnson & Johnson’s Simponi, its successor to Remicade, is off to a bad start: The FDA issued a “Dear Doctor” letter noting that it might kill you if your doc doesn’t know what he’s doing. “Serious fungal infections” are associated with Simponi, the letter states, and if they go unrecognized it can result in death. Simponi, made by J&J’s...

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A Los Angeles man has sued Amgen claiming that the company lied to him in order to enrol him in a trial for Enbrel, and that he lost all his body hair as a result. William Moke, 40, claims that when he discovered his condition should not have been treated with Enbrel his doctor and Amgen destroyed some of his medical records. (Download a copy of Moke v. Amgen here.) In 2004, Moke went to his...

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Bodysnatchers! Scorpions! Sex drugs! It all happened in May. Here are BNET’s 10 weirdest drug stories of the month: Johnson & Johnson bought stolen body parts for research Ernest V. Nelson, 51, cut up heads, torsos and other parts from donated corpses stolen from UCLA and sold them medical and pharmaceutical research companies, including J&J, collecting $1.5 million between 1999...

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It’s not until you read the Indian press that it dawns on you what a total disaster Ranbaxy is — and by extension its deal to supply AstraZeneca with a Nexium ingredient. BNET noted in March that Ranbaxy was accused of submitting fake data to the FDA on several drugs (and that, amazingly, the FDA has continued to approve Ranbaxy drugs in this country). That’s just the tip of...

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Roche may have hair that would turn Skid Row green with envy, but Bio-Rad’s got moves that could teach John Travolta a thing or two. If this makes no sense to you whatsoever, you’re missing out on one heck of a hilarious battle. The players? Laboratory suppliers. The weapons? YouTube videos. It started (as far as I can tell, but correct me if I’m wrong) early last year, when...

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AstraZeneca won a summary judgment in a case involving Seroquel, its antispsychotic, after arguing that the plaintiff may have had diabetes in part because she was black. Plaintiffs in more than 10,000 cases allege that AZ failed to warn them that the drug causes weight gain and diabetes. This is the third ruling AZ has won; none of the cases have gone to trial. In a Delaware state court,...

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Merck should expect to win when the U.S. Supreme Court takes the shareholder class action case filed against it over the Vioxx withdrawal. Investors allege that Merck committed securities fraud because it hid knowledge that Vioxx was dangerous until September 2004, when it was withdrawn from the market because it caused too many cardiovascular problems in patients. Merck’s stock dropped...

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The results of the shareholder vote for control of Amylin’s board of directors are in: dissident investors Eastbourne Capital and Carl Icahn now have two directors on the board (one each). They had proposed a slate of five for the 12-member board. Two new independent board members that Amylin had recently added to the board also survived. There are three ways to interpret this: 1. Amylin...

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In 2003, half the members of the National Institutes of Health’s National Cholesterol Education Program were also members of the Pfizer-funded National Lipid Education Council, according to a failed whistleblower lawsuit. The suit was filed by Jesse Polansky, a former director of outcomes management strategies at Pfizer. He alleged that Pfizer marketed Lipitor for patients with moderately...

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Kevin Nalty was Merck’s consumer product director on Propecia until last week when he quit after a series of videos he posted on YouTube drew too much attention to the drug company. The move came after it emerged that he was “Nalts,” the creator of a YouTube video titled “Farting in Public” (among others) that has earned more than 7.4 million views on YouTube. He is now a...

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