David Sell
The two chief executive officers who engineered the joint venture between Teva Pharmaceuticals and Procter & Gamble are now gone, only slightly more than two years after the deal was announced.
The joint venture, called PGT Healthcare, seems to be working well enough for each company to focus on other challenges, but leadership changes can mean once-heralded plans and practices fall out of favor.
Teva said at the end of the first quarter that its revenues related to the joint venture amounted to $240 million, an increase of 47%, compared to $163 million in the first quarter of 2012.
David Sell
Many taxpayers expect the government to plan for every contingency, so perhaps it makes sense to have the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority - and then have it plan to develop medicine in case of a nuclear attack.
(This, of course, assumes we're not all vaporized.)
That really is part of the official mission of BARDA, which is within the Department of Health and Human Services. BARDA announced a $200 million agreement with GlaxoSmithKline on Wednesday. The goal of the agreement is to develop new antibiotics that help with infections, whether they occur in an otherwise normal visits to a hospital......or in a nuclear, chemical or biological terrorist attack.
David Sell
Apple chief executive Tim Cook spent two hours before a Senate committee Tuesday defending how the computer device maker uses subsidiaries to shelter billions of dollars in cash offshore to avoid paying taxes.
Pharmaceutical companies, including the biggest multi-nationals such as Pfizer, Merck and Johnson & Johnson, use similar tactics. That was particularly evident Monday, when drugmaker Actavis announced it would spend $5 billion in stock to buy Warner Chilcutt, Plc.
Actavis bought Warner Chilcutt in part because it is "domiciled" or registered in Ireland which has low corporate taxes. (Ireland has other economic problems, but we'll leave that for others today.) But the main offices of both companies are in North Jersey and Actavis will continue to operate from Parsippany.
David Sell
You think you got money problems?
Get in line.
Gary Gibbons graduated from, and worked at, very fancy schools and medical facilities, but he understands that some folks in America face different challenges because the places they live in are challenging. It doesn't relieve anyone of personal responsibility, but there are different challenges.
David Sell
Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey says he spends a lot of time pushing for funding of the National Institutes of Health because it translates into jobs in Philadelphia and other parts of this region.
"There is bipartisan consensus, less so on financial levels, but we're not as far apart as we are on other issues," Casey said in a meeting Friday with Inquirer reporters and editors. "I focus on [NIH funding] for a couple reasons. No. 1 is because this region of the country has made great progress but also there is no region more at risk than Southeastern Pennsylvania because of the dollars the state gets."
A Scranton Democrat, Casey said breakthroughs in medical and life sciences research happened in Philadelphia and the surrounding area because of expertise, but also because NIH funding helps pay for the expertise.
David Sell
Ranbaxy Laboratories, Ltd., is an India-based pharmaceutical company with a U.S. subsidiary, Ranbaxy USA Inc., headquartered in Parsippany, N.J.
Ranbaxy provided another example this week that drug companies the world over are sometimes willing to skirt rules and laws, while ignoring public and patient safety.
The Justice Department said Monday that it had reached the largest drug safety settlement to date with a generic drug manufacturer. Ranbaxy agreed to pay $500 million and plead guilty to criminal charges relating to the manufacture and distribution of certain drugs made at two of Ranbaxy’s facilities in India. The Justice Department statement is here.
David Sell
Movie star Angelina Jolie's revelation Tuesday of having had a double mastectomy to help avoid breast cancer had business and legal angles.
Myriad Genetics, the Utah-based company at the center of a legal debate about the acceptability of gene patenting, has a monopoly on the testing Jolie had before opting for surgery. With the news of Jolie breaking in the morning, the company's stock rose to a three-year high of $34.70 during trading on the NASDAQ market on Tuesday. The trading volume was also much higher, with 2.6 million shares exchanged, more than double the three-month daily average of 1.1 million shares.
Jolie explained her decision in an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, a link to which is here.
David Sell
Indiana farmer Vaughn Hugh Bowman got shut out at the Supreme Court and some of the cheering from the stands was the biotech industry.
A soybean farmer from Indiana, Bowman took on a giant in the industrialized agriculture world, Monsanto, and lost badly. All nine justices ruled in favor of Monsanto. The case was Bowman v. Monsanto et al., and a link to the opinion is here.
The court will decide several cases this spring that involve patent law and drug companies. Still to come is a decision on human gene patenting and whether generic and brand-name companies violated antitrust laws in settling litigation about patent infringement.
David Sell
Malvern-based Endo Health Solutions will be a stock to watch Monday when the stock market opens because of Friday evening's news that the FDA had rejected the company's request to stop generic competitors to Endo's Opana ER opioid painkiller.
The FDA announcement came after the trading closed Friday. But word of the pending announcement leaked out enough that trading was halted Friday before the market closed.
David Sell
A New York federal judge on Friday gave the go-ahead for women of any age to buy over-the-counter, morning-after oral contraceptives. Plan B is made by Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd., which is based in Israel but has its Americas headquarters in North Wales, Montgomery County. There are also generic versions.
The Associated Press story is below:
By Larry Neumeister
- Adolor
- Almac
- AmerisourceBergen
- AstraZeneca
- Auxilium
- Bayer
- Celgene
- Cephalon
- Endo
- GlaxoSmithKline
- Johnson & Johnson
- Kensey Nash
- Lannett
- Merck
- Pfizer
- Roche
- Sanofi-aventis
- Shire
- Stryker
- Synthes
- Teva
- ViroPharma
- West
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
- Centers for Medicare and Medicaid
- Clinical Trials
- Food and Drug Administration
- Office of Inspector General, Health and Human Services
- OIG Most-wanted list of fugitives
- Securities and Exchange Commission/Edgar filings
- U.S. Attorney's Office/Eastern Pennsylvania, health-care fraud
- U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
- BIO
- Jersey Association of Medical Equipment Services
- Pennsylvania Association of Medical Suppliers
- Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America
- Science Center
- American Health Lawyers Association
- Drug and Device Law
- Orange Book blog
- Taxpayers Against Fraud
- Bio Century
- Bio Space
- Cafe Pharma
- Financial Times
- In The Pipeline
- Monday Morning
- New York Times/Prescriptions
- Pharma Live
- Pharma Marketing
- Pharmalot
- The Placebo Effect
- Wall Street Journal/Health blog
