Novartis' newly acquired Arzerra (ofatumumab) is up against some hefty competition in chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). But the Swiss drugmaker has a plan for helping it achieve its sales potential.The Basel-based company is forking over as much as $1 billion to GlaxoSmithKline for the rights to the therapy as a multiple sclerosis treatment, it said Friday, including $300 million up front and $200 million once it enters its first Phase III trial in the disease area. After acquiring the med's c...

Gilead CEO John Martin No one would say Gilead Sciences CEO John Martin is hurting financially. For several years, he has collected annual compensation worth about $15 million. Not too shabby. And his stock gains since 2009 run into the hundreds of millions--yes, hundreds. But for a record-smashing year that vaulted his company into the ranks of the global top 10, Martin snared a comparatively small payoff. True, Martin's 2014 compensation grew by $3.5 million, to almost $19...

For some industry watchers, AbbVie's ($ABBV) $21 billion pact to buy Imbruvica-maker Pharmacyclics ($PCYC) begged a lot of questions. For instance, after the company agreed to pay a price that steep--or "lofty," "staggering," and even "astronomical," to use analysts' words--how much would Imbruvica actually rack up in peak sales? And where would those sales come from? The Illinois pharma proposed answers to those questions and more on a conference call last week. For starters, it ...

Suspicions are confirmed: Pharma's spending on ads took a flying leap last year. By Kantar Media's numbers, direct-to-consumer ad spend hit $4.53 billion in 2014, up about 18% from $3.83 billion in 2013. That total beats the last several years handily, and for ad agencies and media outlets, marks a heartening recovery from the $3.47 billion trough in 2012. It's higher than the $4.17 billion spent in 2010 and higher than the $4.43 billion total in 2008. And while it's not exactly in the neighbor...

Dana Farber's Glenn Dranoff Novartis ($NVS), a leader among companies using the immune system to fight cancer, is betting up to $750 million on a promising therapeutic approach from Aduro Biotech, widening its arsenal of potential treatments. And the pharma giant coupled the deal with the announcement that it recruited Dana Farber's Glenn Dranoff to run a new in-house R&D group for cancer immunotherapies that will recruit about 50 investigators in the coming months. Under...

Spring is arriving, bringing with it pollen, allergy suffering, and litigation. With a $35 billion allergy market at stake, Johnson & Johnson and GlaxoSmithKline are duking it out over whose products do the best job of treating sniffling, sneezing and stuffy noses. J&J, whose McNeil Consumer Health sells Benadryl and Zyrtec, has sued GSK over advertising claims the British drugmaker made for its Flonase, Reuters reports. GSK last July got FDA approval for over-the-counter sales of the n...

The names at the very top of our yearly list of biggest pharma companies are no surprise. Johnson & Johnson, Novartis, Roche and Pfizer have headed up the rankings for a couple of years now, albeit in varying order. But toward the bottom of the top 10, there's been a changing of the guard. For the first time, a biotech company has nudged aside one of the biggest Big Pharma names. Eli Lilly & Co. , which hung onto 10th place last year by its fingernails, is now out of the top 10, replace...

Not long after Gilead Sciences' high-priced hep C superdrugs Sovaldi, and then combo drug Harvoni, hit the market, the California drugmaker struck deals with 11 generic drugmakers to make cut-rate versions available, and affordable, in 91 developing countries. But Gilead is not as generous as it might seem, Doctors Without Borders claims. It says Gilead has loaded up production agreements with nefarious requirements to milk it for profits, provisions that will make it hard, if not impossible for...