Category: Drugs

JGrimes
Another day, another stock-price jump.
First, the preliminaries: An advisory panel this afternoon recommended the FDA approve a lung drug developed by InterMune, with majorities of the outside experts saying the proposed treatment appeared effective and safe.
The FDA is expected to decide by early May whether to go along with the panel’s recommendation on […]

JGrimes
The FDA staff said it has a bunch of questions about InterMune’s new drug to slow deteriorating lung functioning. But investors figure the concerns weren’t as bad as they could have been, sending the biotech’s shares soaring.
The stock jumped as much as 74% after FDA reviewers said only one of InterMune’s two late-stage […]

JGrimes
Bad news on the Alzheimer’s drug development front: Pfizer and Medivation announced negative results from a large late-stage trial of Dimebon, thought to be a promising treatment more potent than those currently on the market.
Dimebon, you may remember, got its start a quarter-century ago as a Russian cold medicine that Pfizer plunked down […]

JGrimes
It seemed like only a question of time, but Bristol-Myers Squibb said this afternoon that Lamberto Andreotti, its president and chief operating officer since last March, would succeed James M. Cornelius as CEO.
Andreotti, a 12-year veteran of the company, is 59 years old and Cornelius is 66. Cornelius was tapped as Bristol-Myers CEO […]

JGrimes
In what could be a win-win decision for both Teva Pharmaceutical and Merck, a federal court said that Teva was entitled to six months of exclusivity to sell generic versions of two hypertension medicines made by Merck.
A district court ruled in July that Teva, the largest of the generic drug makers, had forfeited […]

JGrimes
New Novartis chief Joe Jimenez (right) is looking at beefing up some business segments with acquisitions, but has nothing in mind as big as its $39.3 billion plan to buy the rest of eye-care company Alcon.
“We may go for smaller, bolt-on acquisitions to help build scale in vaccines, generics and consumer health, but […]

noreply@blogger.com (RCoffield@fsblaw.com)
Patients concerned about side effects associated with aspirin, particularly the risk of gastrointestinal problems such as ulcers, often try taking versions of the drug that are coated with enteric.
Though patients often believe these pills pose a lower risk of stomach upset, they actually don’t appear to have much effect on the more […]

noreply@blogger.com (RCoffield@fsblaw.com)
Health Blog readers aren’t the only folks who realize the influence of the Internet. So do drug marketers. They have taken notice of the Web’s impact on people’s preferences and are adjusting pharmaceutical advertising accordingly, today’s Wall Street Journal reports.
Hence the small but growing number of advertisements for prescription medicines that feature […]

noreply@blogger.com (RCoffield@fsblaw.com)
We recounted earlier this week that Roche’s cancer drug Avastin had missed achieving its main target in a stomach-cancer study. Today the news is flipped as a new study reported Avastin showed positive results in the treatment of advanced ovarian cancer.
The latest showed that women who continued using Avastin alone after receiving […]

James A. White
Last we heard of Fablyn, an experimental bone drug for the treatment of postmenopausal women, U.S. regulators were holding off on approval after FDA staff and outside reviewers raised concerns and Pfizer, the pill’s maker, was shopping it around to other companies.
Today’s New England Journal of Medicine reports that the drug […]