Pharma Industry Archive

If you’re following Mylan’s fight with the FDA over whether the agency did or did not give the generic maker a clean bill of health at its Morgantown, W.Va., factory, you’ll be interested to know that this is not the first time the FDA has frowned upon the company. Back story: The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published a must-read story on Sunday detailing workers in Mylan’s...

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Sales of Wyeth’s antidepressant Pristiq were conspicuous by their absence in the company’s Q2 2009 earnings report. Wyeth said only that Pristiq had “higher sales” but gave no numbers. The company was hoping Pristiq, which launched last year, would replace its $3.5 billion-a-year blockbuster Effexor, which went off-patent in 2008. Effexor sales were down 25 percent to...

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Bristol-Myers Squibb is mostly losing its Plavix securities litigation. It’s 10-Q filing with the SEC says it just paid out $125 million to settle a suit over the 2006 fiasco; it settled a second suit for an undisclosed sum; and two others remain pending. Back story: BMS struck a bonkers deal with Apotex in which Apotex would buy a license to produce BMS’s blockbuster blood-thinner....

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Gilead continues to astonish: If you remove transaction and restructuring costs, the company’s acquisition of CV Therapeutics has actually made it even more efficient than it was before, according to its its Q2 2009 results. That’s unexpected because CVT was an incredibly inefficient producer of its own revenues. So how did Gilead do it? Revenues were $1.6 billion, up 29 percent;...

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Pfizer has launched a Twitter account and wants to see an army of 100 execs contributing to its tweet stream. If that happened, it would be reminiscent of an idea floated by a consultant to Johnson & Johnson in 2007. That consultant urged J&J to give all of its 120,000 employees their own blog. (Thus far, J&J has had two blogs, one of which died.) Pr chief Ray Kerins told was quoted...

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According to documents filed with California’s Economic Development Department, it looks like the layoffs are far from over at Roche’s Palo Alto site, home of the biotech formerly known as Genentech. An earlier version of this post mistakenly said the Palo Alto site was home of the biotech formerly known as Genentech. Please excuse this San Diego hillbilly her lack of Bay Area geographic...

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Wall Street applauded Wyeth’s Q2 2009 earnings report but with the dust settled it turns out there are a couple of cracks in the Wyeth business as is prepares to merge with Pfizer. The First one is its Centrum vitamin unit, which was down 7 percent to $171 million. The second was a ruling by a federal judge that Wyeth must reveal its ghostwriting practices in 8,000 Prempro and Premarin...

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Sales reps at Pfizer are using a CafePharma bulletin board to discuss whether it is common for their colleagues to sleep with the doctors whom they are trying to persuade to write prescriptions. Surprisingly for CafePharma — which has a reputation for being juvenile, offensive and misogynist — the debate is relatively level-headed and tame. Most commenters seem to agree that sex...

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Sepracor has once again achieved the impossible by growing sales of its sleeping pill Lunesta despite an almost infinite number of generic and OTC competitors. Lunesta sales were up 2 percent to $151 million in Q2 2009, the company reported. The basics: revenues increased 11% to $326.2 million; net income was down 88 percent from a one time gain the prior year. Lunesta results will likely be...

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Here’s a depressing exchange in the litigation on Pfizer’s anti-seizure med, Neurontin. It’s between the doctor of Susan Bulger, who killed herself after taking the pill. Her family claims Pfizer knew the drug caused suicidal thoughts in some people but sat on information: Last year, Bulger’s doctor, Dino Crognale testified in a deposition: Q. When you prescribe a...

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