Category: Pfizer

Katherine Hobson
Pfizer CFO said on an earnings call with analysts that his company is looking for acquisitions worth between a few billion to several billion dollars.
Read more this great post here

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 […]

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 […]

Anna Wilde Mathews
Pfizer has won FDA approval of a product developed by Wyeth, which Pfizer bought last year for $68 billion. And it’s a biggie — a updated version of the world’s best-selling vaccine Prevnar. See the Pfizer announcement.
The new version of the childhood vaccine called Prevnar 13 is intended to fight six […]

noreply@blogger.com (RCoffield@fsblaw.com)
With an apparent eye on Pfizer’s experience early this month, Merck officials made one thing abundantly clear during the morning’s earnings report: “Nothing in our guidance has changed,” CFO Peter Kellogg said on a conference call with analysts.
The emphasis was undoubtedly a reaction to Pfizer’s Feb. 3 earnings report when it lowered […]

noreply@blogger.com (RCoffield@fsblaw.com)
To expand its business in emerging markets, Pfizer is taking a page out of the supermarket playbook: Offer a card that patients can present at the pharmacy to get a discount on their drugs. The card also allows the company to study patient behavior, and to remind patients to pick up their […]

noreply@blogger.com (RCoffield@fsblaw.com)
Pfizer spent $2.8 billion on R&D in the fourth quarter of last year, according to today’s earnings announcement from the company. But R&D spending is about to fall pretty sharply, according to estimates from the company.
This is no surprise — the big spending in the fourth quarter was largely the result of […]

noreply@blogger.com (RCoffield@fsblaw.com)
The distance between Big Pharma and the generic drugs business keeps getting narrower. Under a deal with an Indian drugs shop Strides Arcolab, Pfizer will add some 40 off-patent drugs, including many cancer medicines, to the list of products it sells in the U.S. Here’s a statement Pfizer put out describing the […]

Jacob Goldstein
U.S. investment in R&D fell slightly this year, and is expected to start growing again next year, according to a new report out from the Batelle Memorial Institute, a nonprofit group that looks at that sort of thing.
A story in this morning’s WSJ has more on the issue; Health Blog readers may […]

James A. White
From the record-keeping department, some executive announcements from two big drug makers this week:
Today, Merck said it is naming Michael Rosenblatt to the new position of chief medical officer. Rosenblatt, a Harvard-trained endocrinologist, has been dean of Tufts University School of Medicine since 2003.
He had worked at Merck in the late […]