What’s really driving the Roche bid for Genentech?

Roche’s current business arrangements with Genentech give Roche all non-US marketing and development rights to Genentech’s product line through 2015. While that may seem a long way off to some people, Genentech apparently has as many as 100 products in it’s current development pipeline, and as these products move into clinical trials, the ability to [...]

Reputation, expectation, and social stature

Well, the good news is that the pharmaceutical industry’s reputation appears to be better than President Bush’s. What’s the bad news? Its “job approval rating” is only slightly better than the President’s!

“Differential pricing” in emerging markets: Part II

Apparently someone in the major media has finally picked up on the strategic initiatives evolving at at least a couple of the major pharmaceutical companies to use differential pricing strategies and focused marketing teams to penetrate the emerging pharmaceutical markets from China, India, and Indonesia to Columbia, Panama, and Brazil. We first blogged about this [...]

In some cases, timing is everything …

IMS Health (a client of Vox Medica) traditionally issued their gobal oncology forecast each October and achieved limited media coverage. This year, they have done something different.

Health care and Web 2.0: now available at …

There’s a lot chatter from the gurus about the potential roles of web 2.0 in building health care “communities of interest.” However, chatter is one thing and actually doing it is another.
If you want to see how this sort of thing actually can work, have a look at the following two linked sites:

The “New” Prostate [...]

Finally … an insider who will talk about (one of) the elephants in the room

According to Mike Huckman of CNBC, a major pharmaceutical industry insider has finally acknowldeged that, “The industry has a black eye.” The problem is that it’s someone whose credibility was at its height nearly 20 years ago, and who knows whether the industry can really “hear him” today.

And today, from the delusional thinking report …

ITEM … If you are both a director of Pfizer AND the physician-in-chief at Massachusetts General Hospital, is it really sensible for you to go on record as a defender of the pharmaceutical industry in the midst of a media storm about some of its excesses?

Recognition of a “truth deficit.” Is the rubber hitting the road?

The following quote is lifted from today’s FiercePharma, with full acknowledgement, under the heading ‘Pharma CEOs mull industry “truth deficit”.’
“We love it when pharma CEOs depart from their usual talking points about financial results and restructurings and pipelines, to wax philosophical on their place in the [world].”
Is it actually possible that some of the major [...]

Failure all around in conduct of post-approval drug trials

We can probably be equal-handed in raising questions about “who’s to blame” for the continuing poor record for conduct of post-approval studies of approved drugs requested by the US Food & Drug Administration at the time of approval.
According to the most recent report from the FDA, as of September 30, 2006, there were a total [...]

Reagan-Udall: an update

According to former FDA Commissioner Mark McClellan (now the chairman of the Reagan-Udall Foundation, among other roles), there has been significant, if slower than hoped, progress in the establishment and initial development of the Regan-Udall Foundation.
The Foundation’s fundamental remit is to support the FDA’s scientific mission. For an introductory overview of Dr. McClellan’s current assessment [...]