Pharma News this week

Some surprises in the new diabetes guidelines issue by the American Diabetes Association and European Association for the Study of Diabetes…more

Speaking of diabetes – we’re paying a lot more over the last few years!

And, a triple dose of diabetes news, including bad news for Avandia.

Medtronic exec says devices are finished?????? Now that’s an interesting PR move!

FDA accepts priority review of expanded Erbitux label.

My favorite headline of the week. Type-1 Diabetes Not So Much Bad Genes as Good Genes Behaving Badly, Stanford Research Shows.

Novo: we have cash and we know how to use it – Novo Nordisk A/S is earmarking as much as $2 billion for takeovers in the next 12 months as the financial crisis forces cash-strapped biotechnology companies onto the market, Chief Financial Officer Jesper Brandgaard said.“We are more or less able to finance in cash acquisitions within the $1 billion to $2 billion range,” Brandgaard said in a phone interview from Copenhagen. “We think there will be opportunities in biotech which we haven’t seen before.”…more

Meet the new team at Pfizer.

Ortho Clinical Diagnostics gets a biological tester approved.

Big Crestor study results could be “game changer” – A forthcoming AstraZeneca study could dramatically increase the market for cholesterol-lowering drugs, otherwise known as statins, which are already pharma’s biggest success story, Forbes writes…more

New “Superbug” antibiotics on the way? – Two experimental antibiotics appear to work safely against an increasingly common and dangerous form of infection called methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus or MRSA, researchers said on Sunday…more

Schering’s new anesthesia-recovery drug looking good – An experimental drug worked many times faster than a standard treatment in helping surgery patients recover from anesthesia, according to a just-published study funded by its developer, Schering-Plough Corp…more

Lashes. Lovely lashes. And an eye-color change, too. Welcome to Lumigan.

$1.4 Billion – “not meaningful” to Eli Lilly. Huh?

Some promising Phase III clinical trial results – Novartis biologic shows great efficacy on a rare autoinflammatory disease. And, Merck‘s Isentress looks good on treatment-naive HIV patients.

Apidra approved for pediatric diabetes – Sanofi-aventis announced today that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Apidra® (insulin glulisine [rDNA origin] injection) to improve glycemic control in children (4 years and older) with diabetes mellitus…more

U.S. drug sales growing much more slowly than forecast – The number crunchers at IMS Health just cut their estimate for growth of U.S. drug sales to 1% to 2% this year– way down from the 4% to 5% they’d previously forecasted, the WSJ reports…more

BusinessWeek chats with a few pharma CEOs – As part of a package of stories about big pharma, BusinessWeek grabbed the ceo at four drugmakers – Pfizer’s Jeff Kindler; Bristol-Myers Squibb’s Jim Cornelius; Lilly’s John Lechleiter and Roche’s Severin Schwan – to discuss the varied and vexing problems the industry faces. Here are a few of their comments…more