Derek Lowe

2010 has gotten off to a vile start for the large pharma companies. They were key players right from the beginning of the Obama administration's health care reform efforts - or, looked at another way, they were co-opted early - but are now facing a dead loss on their investment. And their problems did not lessen one bit during all the legislative wrangling. Drug discovery is still at what looks like an unsustainably low pace, regulatory and safety concerns are…… More »

Merck and Schering-Plough, Wyeth and Pfizer. . .well, OK, everybody and Pfizer. There have been plenty of big mergers over the last few years in the drug industry, and they've always been accompanied by talk of economies of scale, critical mass, synergies, incredible opportunities that will come from merging two wonderful research pipelines and terrific development organizations. It's enough to make you think that these things are good ideas.Until you look at the…… More »

Two big mergers are now shaking out in the drug business: Pfizer/Wyeth and Merck/Schering-Plough. Employees at the latter have told me that they're still waiting for the cuts that they know have to come, but the Pfizer and Wyeth people are facing them right now. And the size and shape of those layoffs, and others around the industry, is not encouraging.… More »

Just how much does the drug industry spend on R&D? And how does that compare to what it spends on sales and marketing? These are argument-inducing questions, but we now have some more data to argue about. … More »

There's a deal that was announced this morning in the pharmaceutical business that shows two (nearly contradictory) things at the same time. Concert Pharmaceuticals, a start-up company in Massachusetts, has partnered with behemoth GlaxoSmithKline to develop a series of compounds which might show improved blood levels and toxicity profiles compared to existing drugs. So far, so good - deals like this happen all the time. But there's an odd feature here. … More »

An R&D crisis for Bay Area biotech.… More »

The HIV-drug alliance between GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer is getting a lot more play in the press than I thought it would. Deals between the big pharmaceutical outfits are not rare. Merck and Schering Plough teamed up for Vytorin, and Merck similarly joined Bristol-Myers Squibb on a (failed) diabetes drug a few years ago. J&J and Bayer are partnered on a Bayer anticoagulant drug, Schering-Plough and J&J split Remicade (an agreement which is complicating…… More »

It's been quite a ride, at least for the drug companies fortunate enough to have discovered one. The blockbuster drugs are the ones that transform companies with a flood of revenue, changing them forever in just a few short years while the patent is in force. There's a list of famous names in this category, going back to Valium from Hoffman LaRoche, through Zantac with Glaxo, and leading to the biggest of them all (so far): Lipitor (Warner-Lambert and then Pfizer).…… More »

Megan's "Age Before Beauty" post is certainly true - older workers most definitely have a harder time landing a new job, particularly in a down economy. In my own industry (pharmaceuticals) I hear persistent stories of some of the large companies deliberately reworking the demographics of their work force in a way that brings this problem to mind.The terminal degree for a scientist is a PhD. In most drug companies, that's the degree you'll need to have if you plan…… More »

I wrote here about a potential entrepreneurial freeze in the biotech and pharmaceutical world, and it appears to be underway. Take a look at the figures for IPOs in the area (and thanks to the Wall Street Journal's Health Blog for pointing these out). Last year was the worst year for taking a biotech company public since at least 1996 (there was one IPO) and it's hard to imagine that 2009 will be much better.… More »

So after weeks of rumors, Merck has decided to buy Schering-Plough. This ends two eras - the one where S-P was one of the last mid-sized pharmaceutical companies, and the one where Merck grew mostly from the inside. I have to say, I'm sorry to see the end of both. Drug discovery is risky and complicated, and it needs as many different viewpoints and shots on goal as possible. Big mergers like this don't help the industry's ecology much. Today's merger isn't as…… More »

The Supreme Court made news yesterday with its decision in Wyeth v. Levine, a case that brought up the possibility that if a drug (and its warning labels) had been approved by the FDA, that state-level court decisions couldn't alter them or open the door to lawsuits regarding them. This idea (pre-emption) is not unknown. It exists in some forms for medical devices, but the court thoroughly rejected the idea that it applies to prescription drugs. Stevens, Kennedy,…… More »

India is a source for a goodly amount of the world's generic drugs - there are some large and serious companies there, with a lot of expertise. And in recent years, they've just been getting larger and more serious all the time, which makes a couple of recent news items very disturbing reading.… More »

So now that the Obama administration looks set to change the Bush administration's restrictions on stem cell research, is it time to invest in the area? Only with money you can absolutely afford to lose, in my opinion.There are several reasons for this. For one thing, the administration hasn't acted yet, and a few people who expected immediate action are starting to wonder if that means something unpleasant. But even when the rules change, the effect on the stocks…… More »

You've probably never heard of La Jolla Pharmaceuticals. To be honest, even though I work in the industry, neither had I. But this small company had a drug in Phase III for lupus, a disease for which there are no good treatments. And today they were notified by their review board that the whole study had to be scrapped, immediately: there was no chance that the drug could possibly be showing a useful endpoint, and continuing it would be unethical. La Jolla's stock…… More »

So Carl Icahn is back to make another attempt at the board of directors of Biogen, one of the largest of the biotech companies. (For reasons that a securities lawyer would best be able to figure out, Icahn is also proposing to change the company's jurisdiction of incorporation to North Dakota, and no, I'm not just making that part up). This comes after his adventure at Imclone, where he successfully caused the company to cease to exist, selling it out to Eli Lilly…… More »

The current economic slump couldn't have come at a worse time for the drug industry, which has been staggering through a prolonged slump in the number of good drugs brought to market (and in the number that stay there, come to think of it). But many of the companies are still rich in cash, for now, and the pressure to do something with it is bringing all kinds of stupid ideas out. … More »

So Merck and Schering-Plough are out today with some news that really gets attention these days: they beat their earnings forecasts. So, what on Earth could that mean?Well, for one thing, both these companies (like nearly everyone else in the drug business) have been cutting costs like mad for the past year or so (for which read, mostly, shedding staff and closing facilities). And that seems to have worked, insofar as you can trust the numbers, or anyone's numbers.…… More »

A lot of my kind of work gets outsourced these days. Ten years ago, the idea of having people in China or India do chemistry research for you seemed quite exotic, but it sure doesn't surprise anyone now. Just about everyone in the business, from Pfizer on down to some rather small companies, contracts out work. Most of what gets shipped out is bread-and-butter stuff, such as repetitively cranking out long series of analogs of lead compounds - the sort of thing that…… More »

Those of us in the drug industry don't really know what to expect from the Obama administration (although we're pretty sure that we're probably not going to like a lot of what we're likely to get). But it's not like things were going wonderfully during the Bush years, either, to be honest. Decisions on Medicare pricing, liability law, reimportation and other issues can all have their effects, but none of them will change the underlying problems that have put the…… More »