Category: China

Laura Landro
Also: Most C-sections performed before labor starts; American companies push into Chinese electronic medical record market; investigators looking at health-care credit cards.
Read more this great post here

MEwens
Merck isn’t ruling out making outright purchases of emerging-market companies, but competition is fierce.
Read more this great post here

noreply@blogger.com (RCoffield@fsblaw.com)
Pfizer’s China strategy came up a few times today in the company’s earnings call with analysts.
In some ways, the approach sounds like pharma’s strategy in the U.S. a few years back, when the industry was swimming with sales reps and companies were aggressively wooing “key opinion leaders” — top physicians who could […]

noreply@blogger.com (RCoffield@fsblaw.com)
Public health officials in the U.S. are worried because nearly a third of births here are c-sections, more than twice the rate public officials say would be appropriate. But in China, the rate is far higher: 46%, according to a WHO study published this week in the Lancet.
The study looked at data […]

noreply@blogger.com (RCoffield@fsblaw.com)
Lots of big drug makers have been pushing into China lately. Eli Lilly’s adding jobs there even as it makes cuts in the U.S.; Novartis is spending $1 billion to expand an R&D facility in Shanghai; and Pfizer has made a couple deals to study and sell drugs in China.
But at least […]

JGrimes
Here’s a quick tour of drug and vaccine news from around the globe:
Sanofi-Aventis is recalling 800,000 doses of swine flu vaccine sold in the U.S. for use in infants and toddlers. The vaccine is safe, but it appears to have to have fallen “slightly below” the specified potency, the CDC said. The recalled […]

JGrimes
Eli Lilly recently said it plans to cut its workforce to 35,000 by the end of 2011. But a detail in Lilly’s latest earnings announcement shows that the company has actually been moving in the opposite direction this year: The number of worldwide employees rose to 40,800 as of Sept. 30, up from […]

JGrimes
Former FDA Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach has joined Newt Gingrich’s health think tank, the Center for Health Transformation, as an adviser.
He will lead the center’s “21st Century FDA Modernization Project,” which will look at improving the effectiveness of the FDA, according to a press release. Von Eschenbach, an appointee of George W. Bush, […]

JGrimes
China is hashing out the details of its health-reform plan, which aims to provide coverage to millions of uninsured Chinese and vastly expand the number of hospitals in the country. Some highlights of the $120-billion-plus plan:
Hospitals: By 2011, the government wants every village to have a medical clinic and every county to have […]

Scott Hensley
A scan of the WSJ’s health news this morning reminds us of Asia’s central role in the 21st century drug business — and the difficult issues that come with globalization.
First, to India, where drug regulators have determined that a baby who died last fall in a clinical study should have been excluded […]