0
POPSAriad Patent Dead Derek Lowe does a dance of joy. Eli Lilly had compared the patent in question to "patenting gravity." Ariad basically described some basic biology, then hand-waved the potential drugs that could affect it.
0
POPSElan Cuts Jobs From the AP. No other company bounces from highs to lows quite like this one.
0
POPSInfinity Finds Getting Dumped Not So Bad Is being dropped by AstraZeneca a good thing or a bad thing? The market seems to have muted its original reaction. INFI stock on the NASDAQ is down only 2%, compared to 20% earlier in the day. It may be that AstraZeneca just didn't want the small indication this drug, which was originally in development for prostate cancer, a big market, but is now in late-stage development for rare stomach tumors, which is a tiny market. Investors apparently feel that the increased risk signaled by losing a partner is over-ridden by the fact that Infinity will now have full rights to its medicine. We'll see.
1
POPSA CRP Thought Over in the article on theheart.org, Jim Stein puts a point on an idea that came out of last week's Jupiter results: CRP tests may help doctors communicate with patients even if those patients would have been picked up by other risk factors like obesity.
0
POPSAmylin Shares Crash As if the company's diabetes drug Byetta, already dealing with controversies over the risk of pancreatitis, needed more bad news. This potential FDA delay, as reported in the link by TheStreet.com's Elizabeth Trotta, has nothing to do with pancreatitis but with a manufacturing issue related to the new, long-acting Byetta being developed by Amylin, Alkermes, and Eli Lilly. Apparently samples from Alkermes' facility don't match the commercial scale versions made in Amylin's facility. This seems like an execution mistake, and something the companies could have been on top of. No wonder investors aren't happy.
0
POPSThe Return of Harlan Waksal? Harlan Waksal was appointed to the board of New Brunswick's Senesco. Not sure if there's any larger story here. Senesco says it is studying apoptosis, a promising area of cancer research. It takes its name from the aging of plant cells, and is also involved in agricultural biotechnology. But the return of Harlan Waksal, known for being one of the Waksal brothers that founded and ran ImClone Systems, seems worth a mention. Harlan's brother Sam was famously involved in an insider trading scandal that snared Martha Stewart.
0
POPSPain As Merck Leaves Seattle Luke Timmerman at Xconomy has a nice, wistful piece about the closure of what used to be Rosetta Inpharmatics, the company founded by Merck cancer guru Stephen Friend..
0
POPSSanofi Suspends Acomplia Sales There's a lot of worrying lately that the FDA is getting too risk averse. But maybe sometimes being risk averse is the way to go. The European Medicines Agency has expressed concerns about psychiatric side effects for Acomplia, an obesity drug that was approved in Europe but not the U.S. Sanofi is suspending sales of the drug while the matter is worked out. Worth remembering: AstraZeneca's blood-thinner Exanta was approved in Europe, but not the U.S. But then it had to be pulled from the European market too.
0
POPSMerck Cutting Another 6,800 Jobs That brings the total number of positions eliminated between 2005 and 2011 to 17,600. (Four hundred of the positions being cut now are vacant.) Right now, Merck has 56,700 employees, so that will bring the total to 49,900, a 12% reduction. Between 2005 and 2011, that's a 25% reduction. There will be a reduction of senior and mid-level executives of 25% as part of the current reduction.
0
POPSWhat Myriad's Split Means For Gene Diagnostics Myriad's up 7% on news that it's going to split its drug development business from its gene diagnostics business, creating two independent public companies. You'd think that gene-based drugs and gene-based diagnostic tests would be a match made in heaven, right? But so far most companies seem to get hitched to one approach or the other. And it's not really so hard to figure out why. Creating a test and creating a drug both involve huge outlays of expense, and much of the science and regulatory expertise doesn't overlap. Also, having a big success in either field is as rare and difficult as capturing lightning in a bottle. So when you hit a home run in one business, as Myriad has in diagnostics, it is pretty tough to keep it shackled to an effort that is still trying to find its footing, like Myriad's drug development business after the failure of Alzheimer's drug Flurizan.
0
POPSAvastin Keeps Going In Adjuvant Setting Probably a mild disappointment to some investors. The hope was that we'd suddenly find out that the Avastin market was going to expand, immediately impacting the negotiations with Roche. If the data come out positive in 2009, though, that will still be a very big deal.
0
POPSFDA Missing Deadlines If the agency was a journalist, it would probably get filed. Of course, it's not, but Reuters has a nice list of drugs that have been delayed. The lastest is prasugrel. A decision was expected last month, but the news is out that FDA may be considering an advisory panel in February. That would mean a long delay,
0
POPSAffymetrix, From Bad To Worse Shares are down 19% today, and are about one-sixth their 52-week high. Given that rival Illumina is still beating the S&P (though ILMN stock is down a bit for the year), it looks like the bad news is focused solely on Affy.
0
POPSBiotech Buzz Kills Adam Feuerstein over at TheStreet.com always has smart things to say about biotech stocks. In his column today, he makes both Onyxx, which has a big-selling cancer drug, and Exelixis, which is testing cancer drugs, sound very risky. With the markets a mess, it's hard to see how the extremely risky world of cash-hungry biotechs is going to appeal to investors.
0
POPSGFP Researchers Win Nobel Prize Osamu Shimomura (pictured), Martin Chalfie, and Roger Tsien won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their work on green flourescent protein, a tool that has become ubiquitous in modern biology as a tag and molecular highlighter, vastly improving our ability to understand what goes on inside cells. I wrote about the discovery of GFP back in 2001. Click on the link to see my story, Biotech's Glowing Breakthrough.
0
POPSOuch. From $7 to 70 cents in a year. That's biotech. If Synavive does really have pain-killing properties, CombinatoRx execs might want to take some themselves.
0
POPSThe Latest Conflicted Researcher Sen. Charles Grassley has been digging up a lot of these. Gardiner Harris at NYT really manages to pull out some of the larger trends at work, especially toward the end of this piece.
0
POPSMerck Cancels Obesity Drug Probably the right move. Why throw good money after bad. I will be interesting to see what Pfizer decides for its similar compound.
2
Clips
Latest Pops
Latest Comments
Most Pops
Tags
Print
Save
Turn on live update