Pharma Industry Archive

The FDA’s new proposed guidelines on drug advertising read like a full-employment act for medical copywriters and graphic designers: they control font size, white space, context, contrast, placement, background and the use of sections in ads. Overall, they require companies to produce materials that are more comprehensible to the “reasonable consumer;” that are more overt...

More...

Wandering through the BIO 2009 exhibit hall, where representatives from Tennessee to Thailand and Missouri to Manitoba gathered to tout their biotech prowess, you have to wonder: do these folks really get anything out of exhibiting at BIO? Everyone wants to attract biotech to their region, but it just doesn’t seem very likely that any biotech CEOs are perusing the exhibit hall...

More...

Bayer sent 33,561 packets of white powder through the U.S. Postal Service in a promotion for aspirin, triggering a federal alert to local emergency services. According to the Boston Herald: “Police departments are going to be inundated with calls about this. The anthrax scare is still fresh in people’s minds,” said Lawrence Police Chief John J. Romero. “After 9/11 it’s a whole...

More...

A former Vioxx sales rep for Merck who appeared on “Survivor: Gabon” told a reality TV show web site, “Selling drugs is a lie. … I sold Vioxx for Merck before it got taken off the market for killing people. I knew damn well it was dangerous; I went around telling them to write it.” The quote appeared in an interview with Corinne Kaplan (pictured) last September on...

More...

Kevin Nalty, Merck’s consumer product director for Propecia, quit his job last week. The move came after it emerged that he was “Nalts,” the creator of a YouTube video titled “Farting in Public” that has earned more than 7.4 million views on YouTube. Nalty said on his blog that he now intends to go into social media consulting full time. The move demonstrates one...

More...

Yesterday’s release of more AstraZeneca documents in the federal Seroquel litigation provided yet another batch of letters from Wayne MacFadden, psychiatry’s greatest lover. BNET readers will remember that plaintiffs are alleging that MacFadden, AZ’s director of clinical research on Seroquel, used sex to get the results he wanted in some of the studies he was supervising. (The...

More...

If you thought GlaxoSmithKline was a British company with a British corporate headquarters whose American Depositary Receipts traded on the New York Stock Exchange, you’re wrong! Turns out GSK is a Swiss company, and its U.S. unit is just a device to dodge taxes, according to the WSJ. The U.S. government has taken GSK to court, demanding $1.9 billion in taxes owed. It alleges that in the...

More...

The Wall Street Journal notes today that in the merger of Merck and Schering-Plough, CEO Fred Hassan “would receive an exit payout of $17.7 million, pension benefits of $13.2 million and medical benefits valued at $130,750.” That’s a total of about $31 million. But a closer look at the SEC filing shows that Hassan could walk away with much, much more than that: as much as $77...

More...

We’re into the home stretch of the Amylin proxy fight, in which Carl Icahn and Eastbourne Capital are trying to persuade shareholders to let them take control of Amylin’s board, and the company is resisting. So who’s winning? Until a few days ago, it looked like Amylin. But the insurgents appear to have won a few arguments in the final days before the May 27 vote. A week ago,...

More...

Amgen will lay off 101 people at its Bothell, WA., manufacturing facility in July, according to the Seattle Post Intelligencer. The news was expected and had been announced in March. The layoffs come after Q1 2009 sales fell 8 percent to $3.3 billion and net income declined 7 percent to $1 billion. Amgen’s products face a double threat from generic biologics and lower reimbursements from...

More...