Every so often, someone sets up a dartboard of likely targets for Big Pharma buyouts. This time, the target-setter is Barron’s, and the focus is on companies with market values of $10 billion or less. Most of them have at least one marketed product: “It’s less dangerous playing smaller outfits with approved drugs than those [...]
NPS Pharmaceuticals says that it’s on track to file for regulatory approval of Gattex after a late-stage study involving 86 patients demonstrated promising results for reducing the need for IV feeding among a majority of patients with short bowel syndrome. NPS now plans to file in the second half of the year and the news [...]
More drugmakers are seeing potential in the business of producing copycat versions of expensive biotechnology drugs as U.S. guidelines take shape. The topic was at the forefront of plans discussed by several executives at this week’s JP Morgan healthcare conference in San Francisco. Kevin Sharer, chief executive officer at Amgen Inc, said the world’s largest [...]
Merck Serono is teaming up with France’s Domain Therapeutics to take aim at a new target for Parkinson’s and other neurodegenerative diseases. Domain will contribute compounds developed from their chemical series in exchange for a €2 million upfront, research funding and up to €132 million ($175 million) in milestones for the first two products.
The drug development arm of Johnson & Johnson is joining research forces with scientists at the prestigious Sanford-Burnham Institute in an effort to blaze a relatively short path to new drugs for psychiatric disorders as well as Alzheimer’s. And the collaboration–the latest in a string of R&D pacts that have been struck between pharma companies [...]
There are many reasons cancer patients can dread chemotherapy. It might kill their cancer, but those who go through it often wonder if the cure is just as bad as the disease. Among the uncomfortable symptoms is chemotherapy-induced vomiting. Ahmedabad, India-based Lincoln Pharmaceuticals has been granted a patent for its nasal drug delivery system (NDDS) [...]
Eight months after Merck jumped into the driver’s seat to take control of Ariad’s late-stage cancer program ridaforolimus, the biotech is reporting that one of its Phase III study turned in statistically significant results. And the news quickly spurred a 36 percent increase in the biotech’s share price.
A Holy Grail in the drug-delivery business is the quest for a needle-free way for diabetics to take their insulin. Galway, Ireland-based Aerogen and San Francisco-based Dance Pharmaceuticals believe they have found the secret passageway–through the nose. And they’ve announced a drug-delivery partnership to develop an inhaled-insulin device.
Mosquirix, an experimental malaria vaccine from GlaxoSmithKline, provides African children with long-lasting protection and reduces the risk of infection by the parasite that causes severe malaria by 46 percent over 15 months, according to researchers.
Several big biotech and pharma companies have been buzzing about their plans to launch biosimilar programs now that the FDA is laying out a regulatory pathway for the therapies. Reuters pinned down several CEOs at the JP Morgan event, and Amgen’s Kevin Sharer as well as Biogen Idec’s George Scangos talked up plans to fire [...]
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