A new cancer treatment from Novartis ($NVS) and its partners at the University of Pennsylvania came through in another round of early studies, posting stellar results and burnishing the promise of therapies that train the immune system to bear down on tumor cells.
The drug, CTL019, left 92% of patients cancer-free in a leukemia study and performed well against lymphomas in clinical trial results ...
Latest Pharma News in Europe & Middle East
Pfizer buys into gene therapy’s renaissance and bets on Spark Therapeutics
Pfizer ($PFE) is the latest pharma heavyweight to get behind the promise of gene therapy, as the New York drugmaker has laid out plans to set up a dedicated R&D operation and signed a deal with startup Spark Therapeutics to kick-start the effort.
Michael Linden
The company has recruited Michael Linden, a professor at King's College London, to serve a two-year stint settin...
Merck splashes into antibiotics with $9.5B Cubist deal
Merck ($MRK) is shelling out $9.5 billion for antibiotics specialist Cubist Pharmaceuticals ($CBST), joining the wave of major drugmakers with a renewed interest in anti-invectives.
Under the deal, Merck will hand over $102 in cash for each Cubist share, a 35% premium to the company's average stock price last week. That gives Cubist an equity value of $8.4 billion, and Merck is signing up to cove...
The top 10 most expensive drugs of 2013
The price of Gilead Sciences' breakthrough drug Sovaldi has drawn all of the attention this year. By pricing it at $85,000 for a 12-week course, Gilead Sciences ($GILD) has been pilloried by politicians, payers and providers. But as EvaluatePharma points out, at that price Sovaldi barely makes it into the top 20 most expensive drugs, number 19 to be exact, just above Novartis'($NVS) Gleevec and ju...
Takeda profits fall in first half as Actos sales contract…. COO Weber hires Merck vet to fill one of 5 positions in reorg
Christophe Weber
Takeda COO Christophe Weber announced a revamped management structure in September that he is building in an effort to revive the Japanese drugmaker. And from the company's just-released 6-month earnings report, the reason the revamp is needed is apparent.
The drugmaker reported that its revenue for the first half ended Sept. 30 was up 2.8% to ¥851.4 billion ($...
Pharma’s top 10 M&A deals of 2014’s first half
Mergers and acquisitions have been non-stop this year, with lots of deals done, and some doozies that were unable to cross the finish line. Here we look at what's happened in the first half of the year; we will round out the entire year's activity in another report early next year.
The top 10 deals in the first half of 2014 totaled nearly $90 billion in value, with Actavis' ($ACT) $25 billion dea...
Novartis cans a researcher whose cooked data led to a slew of retractions
Novartis ($NVS) has washed its hands of a researcher who admitted to falsifying results in a series of published papers, promising to dig into his work at the company to determine whether the pattern continued in its own labs.
As the federal Office of Research Integrity disclosed, former Vanderbilt biomedical researcher Igor Dzhura falsified figures, made up tests and duplicated computer files ov...
FDA slaps down Bristol-Myers’ marketing pitch for hep C drug daclatasvir
The FDA has slapped down Bristol-Myers Squibb's ($BMY) closely-watched hep C drug daclatasvir, handing out a complete response letter for the lynchpin drug in its cocktail strategy.
According to the big biotech, the initial marketing application for daclatasvir, an NS5A inhibitor, included its use in combination with the NS3/4A protease inhibitor asunaprevir--a combo that Bristol recently scuttle...
Bayer to sell diabetes device biz for as much as $2.5B
The Contour blood glucose meter--Courtesy of Bayer
Bayer hopes to sell its ailing diabetes device unit to help bolster growth and fund a potential acquisition of Zoetis ($ZTS),Bloomberg reports. The conglomerate would like to focus more closely on medicines, which has been a faster growth area than devices.
In September, Bayer sold its interventional device business for $415 mi...
Pfizer-Merck KGaA collaboration could benefit other oncology players with novel delivery tech
Pfizer's ($PFE) partnership with German counterpart Merck KGaA for $850 million upfront, plus as much as $2 billion in milestones, improves the prospects of PD-L1 and PD-1 checkpoint inhibitors in the oncology space, to the excitement of developers of combination therapies to the class of medicines, which feature both biological and mechanical delivery mechanisms.
For, as PD-1 and PD-L1s inhibito...