Pharma Industry Archive

The Medicines Co.’s strategy of turning trash to treasure took a blow this week as the company discontinued two Phase III trials of platelet inhibitor cangrelor due to lack of efficacy. Cangrelor was an AstraZeneca cast-off that Medicines acquired in 2003. The two Phase III trials in patients underoing percutaneous coronary intervention (a.k.a angioplasty) were designed to support a...

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The FDA has warned Sanofi-Aventis to stop claiming that its breast cancer drug Taxotere is superior to Bristol-Myers Squibb’s Taxol. The warning letter is significant because it raps Sanofi for distributing reprints of a clinical study of the two drugs that appeared in the Journal of Clinical Oncology — a type of promotion in which drug companies regard themselves as being on safe...

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Get used to hearing this phrase in the debate over healthcare reform: “a government run-plan.” That is the boogeyman that Eli Lilly CEO John Lechleiter used in his op-ed today in the Wall Street Journal to scare Americans away from universal healthcare coverage. He said: Providing insurance to millions of Americans through a government-run plan would fail the test. Similar efforts...

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Amylin director Karin Eastham has, in essence, called Eastbourne Capital board candidate M. Kathleen Behrens a liar (or at least an amnesiac). On May 11, Behrens had written to Amylin decrying the company’s “baseless accusation[s]” and “innuendo”; she alleged Amylin was spreading a rumor that she wanted to see Amylin acquired by another company at $20 a share. Behrens insisted...

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A Pfizer employee in New Hampshire accidentally dropped a computer hard drive in the trash that had people’s names and social security numbers on it. Pfizer has written to the people affected and offered them two years of credit and identity theft monitoring free of charge. The Pfizer employee discarded the drive on March 26, apparently at home, according to DataBreaches.net. On May 7,...

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A ranking of 20 drug companies by sales and marketing productivity shows that 13 companies saw upward trends in effectiveness in Q1 2009. Only four were trending up last quarter. At the top of the table, as expected, is AIDS drug specialist Gilead. Its score — $7.50 earned in sales for every $1 spent on marketing — asks the question, can it test the $8 barrier? Gilead has nearly...

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Bristol-Myers Squibb’s non-disclosure agreement with professional bipolar disorder patient Andy Behrman expired in January (as BNET noted last December) and, as expected, Behrman has come out of his corner full of allegations about how awful BMS’s promotion of Abilify is. Except that many of Behrman’s punches seem to be landing on himself. In a must-read story in the WSJ...

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When Merck dermatology marketing director Kevin Nalty was exposed as the purveyor of a wildly popular YouTube video consisting entirely of one long fart joke, you could have expected him to take a low profile. Drug companies tend not to have much of a sense of humor. He did, in fact, take a trip to Bermuda, which should have kept him off the radar for a while. But no. Even though he’s...

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Mayer Laboratories announced it will relaunch the Today Sponge, the contraceptive made famous by a Seinfeld episode. The launch is at least the fifth in the history of the brand, which has had at least four different corporate owners. Today is thus the Maltese Falcon of the pharma business — many have chased this macguffin, believing it contains unparalleled riches, only to later abandon...

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The battle for control of Amylin’s board of directors has entered a gossipy phase. One of Eastbourne Capital’s director candidates has written to Amylin claiming the board has been spreading “baseless accusation[s]” and “innuendo” about her, and CNBC’s Mike Huckman has objected to the way Amylin has quoted him in its proxy materials. Eastbourne board...

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