Derek Lowe's commentary on drug discovery and the pharma industry. An editorially independent blog from the publishers of Science Translational Medicine. All content is Derek’s own, and he does not in any way speak for his employer.
No sooner do I write another post about pharma marketing than Pfizer finds itself paying 3.2 2.3 billion dollars in fines for doing it improperly. 1.2 billion of that is a criminal penalty, and needless to say, they’ve set the current record. The issues were off-label promotion of Bexxtra, Geodon, Zyvox, and Lyrica, with the… Read More
I wrote years ago on this blog about REACH, the European program to (as the acronym has it) Register, Evaluate, Authorize and Restrict Chemical substances. (I’m not sure where that second R got off to in there). This is a massive effort to do a sort of catch-up for chemicals that were introduced before modern… Read More
Here’s an interesting post at Chemiotics (a new addition to the blogroll): Something is Wrong With the Model . . . The Center for Disease Control released new data for 2007 (based on 90% of all USA death certificiates) showing that mortality rates dropped again (by over 2%) to 760/100,000 population. It’s been dropping for… Read More
I’m not always a fan of John Boehner, but I think he’s on the right track with his letter to Billy Tauzin (PDF here from NPR’s health care site). I understand that line about how in Washington, if you’re not at the table you’re on the menu. And I understand how the industry wants to… Read More
Now for a bit on the pharma industry and the current fight over health care legislation. Does the industry want a new system to come into force, or not? Depends on what that new system is, of course. But the industry is naturally trying to make sure that it has a hand in whatever passes. Read More
Well, here’s a nasty surprise for you: your new drug gets a 14 to 1 “Yes” vote from an FDA advisory committee, but the agency turns you down, anyway. That’s what’s just happened to Savient and their new biologic product for gout, Krystexxa (pegloticase). The FDA isn’t required to say why they do such things… Read More
I haven’t written about the various health care reform packages that are being hammered out and hammered through the various parts of Congress. That’s partly because I began to think fairly early on in the process that we weren’t actually going to see something happen as quickly as the administration wanted, which meant that there… Read More
I wrote last summer about Vanda Pharmaceuticals and their difficulty getting a new antipsychotic Fanapt (iloperidone) through the FDA. At the time, they’d received one of those wonderful requests for more information from the agency, of the kind that spread cheer whenever they appear. I couldn’t see how the company could clear this up w… Read More
I missed commenting on this earlier, but many readers may have noticed the recent scandal caused by Zicam. This is a cold remedy which was sold as a homeopathic medicine, but its makers committed the unforgivable sin of actually having something in its formula besides well-shaken distilled water. A lot of people are convinced that… Read More
Well, this doesn’t look good for Lilly. A huge pile of court documents has been unsealed in the ongoing lawsuits about Zyprexa’s off-label promotion. The company has already paid some serious fines, and is now fighting it out with insurance companies and other plaintiffs who are seeking to recover their costs. Several states are suing… Read More
