Drugs company Roche has agreed to merge with Genentech, and is to buy the remaining shares of the US firm for $46.8bn (£33.7bn). Roche already owned 55% of Genentech. The deal ends a long struggle between the two companies and is the latest merger in the pharmaceutical sector.
The combined group will generate about $17bn in annual revenues and be the seventh-largest US drugs company. Much of Genentech’s revenue comes from cancer-related drugs. Roche expects the merger to generate annual pre-tax cost savings of about $750m to $850m.
BBC News, 12/3/9
Red tape is severely hampering clinical research in the UK and inadvertently “killing people”, leading researchers have warned. European legislation introduced in 2004 has led to fewer patients enrolled in clinical trials and has caused “huge delays” in research, they said. NHS bureaucracy is a further hurdle to treatments being quickly assessed, a team of UK academics added. Regulators agreed there were some problems with interpreting EU rules.
Despite increased funding in clinical trials in the UK, the number of trials being approved has stayed the same since 2004, when the European directive on clinical trials, designed to improve patient safety, came into force. Additional funding is being eaten up by paperwork, monitoring, and procedures such as detailed labelling of drugs, experts said. In 2002, 6% of trials worldwide were being done in the UK but in 2007 this was 2%.
BBC News 12/3/9
A Massachusetts anesthesiologist has been accused of faking data for a dozen years in 21 published studies that suggested after-surgery benefits from painkillers including Vioxx and Celebrex. Dr. Scott Reuben, who is on leave from Springfield’s Baystate Medical Center, studied the use of several drugs to relieve pain and speed recovery after surgery.
The hospital said a routine review in May found that some of Reuben’s research was not approved by an internal hospital review board. Further investigation found 21 papers published in anesthesiology journals between 1996 and 2008 in which Reuben made up some or all data. Hospital officials said Reuben did not admit to the fabrications.
MSNBC 11/3/9
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29635173/
New guidance has been issued in March 2009. Have a look at http://www.abpi.org.uk/publications/pdfs/ABPI_Code_Guidance_Notes.pdf
The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), the body that approves drugs for the NHS, will go head-to-head with pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) on the issue of drug pricing at the 2009 Bupa Health Debate on 25 March. The debate pits Professor Sir Michael Rawlins, chairman of NICE against Simon Jose, senior vice president of UK pharmaceuticals at GSK, at a time when conflict between the two organisations escalates over Tyverb, a GSK breast cancer drug. NICE is refusing to approve Tyverb because it is “not a cost-effective use of NHS resources”, despite GSK’s offer to fund the drug for the first 12 weeks of treatment.