Pharma Industry Archive

A recent Reuters article noted that “the world’s six biggest-selling drugs in 2014 will all be biotech products.” Interestingly enough, only one of them is actually owned, at least partially, by a biotech company. Top of the list, based on a report from research firm Evaluate Pharma, is Avastin (bevacizumab), an anti-cancer antibody with projected 2014 sales of $9.23 billion. To be fair,...

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Enzon CEO Jeffrey H. Buchalter can be fired, it turns out. In a compromise ceasefire with angry investor group DellaCamera Capital, Buchalter gave up his position as chairman of the company’s board but kept his role as CEO. DellaCamera, livid at the decline in value of its stake in Enzon, had mounted a legal challenge to fire Buchalter after it discovered his contract calls for him to be...

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Wyeth’s Q2 2009 results reveal an interesting statistical criss-cross that goes some way to explaining why Pfizer was keen to buy the company, particularly at this point in time (see chart). The basics: Wyeth’s revenue declined 4 percent to $5.7 billion; net income in the second quarter was $1.27 billion. But as Wyeth’s “productivity initiatives” (ie layoffs) take...

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Medarex CEO Howard Pien stands to make about $4.2 million by allowing Bristol-Myers Squibb to buy his company. The payments — in cash, stock and about $40,000 in healthcare premiums — are part of Pien’s change-of-control agreement with Medarex. Since he joined the company in 2007, Pien will have earned $12 million in compensation (for 2007, 2008, and this bonus) in addition to...

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Walmart is asking its associates to suggest to their doctors “less costly” forms of treatment in a scripted list of questions that sometimes appears to be more in the interest of Walmart’s finance department than that of the patient. Walmart recently cut half the branded drugs covered by its health insurance plan, one of the largest in the U.S. About 700,000 Walmart employees...

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Lupus is like the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail: it’s been telling drug developers for decades that “none shall pass” — and when they insist on trying to cross that Phase III bridge, well, then they must die.   Until this week, when Human Genome Sciences came along on lobbed the Black Knight’s arms off…or cut his kidneys out…whatever, it was more than a...

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Eli Lilly has finally admitted, albeit by omission, that the money it has paid out or set aside for legal claims related to Zyprexa is “meaningful.” Previously, Lilly had labelled the settlement payments — as much as $3.3 billion since 2006 — as “not meaningful” on its quarterly income statements. In its Q2 2009 numbers that label is missing from a charge of...

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Eli Lillys‘ revenues from bloodthinner Effient (prasugrel) were conspicuous by their absence in the company’s Q2 2009 earnings report today. Launched in several countries in Q2, prasugrel made only $300,000, according to a note from Leerink Swann: This heightens our concerns surrounding prasugrel & its int’l & U.S. launches (U.S. launch expected mid-August),...

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Sales of every single drug sold by Pfizer declined in Q2 2009 except for three: depression pill Lyrica, cancer treatment Sutent and the tiny Revatio franchise. Pfizer blamed foreign currency headwinds as it reported sales of $10.9 billion, down 9 percent; and net income of $2.3 billion, a decline of 19 percent. Without that, Pfizer claimed, the company would have had revenue growth: On a...

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Schering-Plough won a federal court ruling ending a class action case that alleged it promoted Intron and Temodar for off-label uses. Federal district court judge Stanley Chesler ruled that even if the company did tout the two cancer drugs off-label plaintiffs must still prove that the drug was ineffectively used, and that patients got no benefit from it. The paintiffs were the Teamsters whose...

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