Life Science Connect Blog
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Will 2015 Be The Year Of Drug Pricing Transparency?
3/6/2015
Lately, the pharma industry has been facing a large amount of resistance to its own price tags. In the past year, we’ve been greeted by headlines about drugs launching with $90-, $100-, and even $140,000-per-patient treatment regimens. But we’ve also been greeted with reports about the high cost of development—a $2.6 billion endeavor, Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development reported last fall.
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FDA News Roundup: Pfizer, Novartis, Sanofi, and More
3/2/2015
What drug approvals have you missed recently?
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How To Snag A Drug R&D Partner: 3 Takeaways From Merck's Latest Deal
2/27/2015
It’s been a week of high-profile acquisitions. We saw Bristol-Myers Squibb snap up Flexus Biosciences for its immunotherapy programs. Shire bought Meritage Pharma. After the Allergan flop, Valeant finally got Salix Pharma to go steady, and Ipsen shelled out 6 million euros to buy U.K.-based biotech Canbex. But arguably more attention was placed on one $450 million collaboration than on the billions spent in this latest batch of acquisitions.
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Could New Gene Therapy Technique Lead To Successful HIV/AIDS Vaccine?
2/20/2015
In a new study published in Nature, researchers from the Scripps Research Institute have found that a new gene therapy technique might be the key to developing the elusive AIDS vaccine. In the study, the researchers found that the treatment technique kept rhesus macaques from becoming infected with simian HIV (SHIV) over the course of a year, even after being given 16 times the amount of virus that made untreated monkeys ill, The New York Times reports.
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AbbVie's Humira Can Tackle The NFL — But Can It Handle Biosimilars?
2/12/2015
Just in time for the Super Bowl last weekend, The Motley Fool revealed that Humira outsold the NFL in 2013 — and it most likely did it again in 2014.
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Sanofi Picks Up Where Pfizer Left Off: Will Inhaled Insulin Catch On This Time?
2/5/2015
On Tuesday, Sanofi and Mannkind took the leap that cost Pfizer billions several years ago and launched Afrezza, a rapid-acting inhaled insulin. Afrezza was approved by the FDA back in June 2014 for type 1 and type 2 diabetes patients to improve glycemic control. But now that it’s been launched, members of the industry and various analysts are voicing concerns about how the product will do on the market, considering the failure of Pfizer’s previously launched inhaled insulin product, Exubera.
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What Could Senator Warren's “Swear Jar” Bill Mean For Pharma's Image?
1/28/2015
President Obama’s recent State of the Union speech addressing precision medicine wasn’t the only government initiative to hit headlines recently. Massachusetts’ senator, Elizabeth Warren, recently proposed what she has dubbed the "swear jar" bill, aka the Medical Innovation Act, which would require big, law-breaking drug makers to send 1 percent of each blockbuster’s annual profits to the NIH for research.
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The Drug Price War Hits Vaccines: Will Pfizer, GSK Give In To MSF Plea?
1/22/2015
A new pricing war is afoot — but this time, it doesn’t involve AbbVie or Gilead Science’s HCV treatments. This week, Pfizer and GSK were both met with push-back from Doctors Without Borders (MSF) to reduce the prices of their pneumococcal vaccines to $5 per child (includes all three doses).
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New Antibiotic Could Fight Resistance, And Other Recent Pharma News
1/16/2015
This week in pharma news, a new antibiotic could be the answer to a global health crisis; changes in Indian packaging regulations could lower consumer risk; and a major merger could be good news for the future development of rare disease treatments.
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“Hyper-Innovation” In Pharma: FDA Approvals Are Just The Start
1/14/2015
It’s clear, after 2014's surge in FDA approvals, that the industry has increased its productivity. Pharma is slowly clawing its way out of what Forbes has labeled the “painful trough” of 2005-2010. But what do these recent approvals tell us about where we are headed — or where we need to be headed — as an industry?