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POPSA Golden Age Of Vaccines? My colleague Robert Langreth has a fantastic story about the cutting edge of vaccine development, including this striking story of a researcher who volunteered to be part of a test for a new malaria vaccine.
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POPSPfizer Yanks Lipitor Ads Congressmen Dingell and Stupak, who have been criticizing the ads that featured medical device pioneer Robert Jarvik, have already issued a statement to reporters saying they are "pleased" by the decision.
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POPSBrain Doping? An online survey in Nature says scientists and engineers are taking concentration-enhancing drugs. Via the WSJ Health Blog.
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POPSApplied Biosystems Launches New Sequencer New, high-speed gene sequencers are likely to change the way biology is studied. This ABI machine will compete with the sequencers made by 454 Life Sciences, now a unit of Roche, and Illumina's Solexa sequencers. Among new sequencer-makers, Helicos appears to be the upstart to watch.
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POPSBad Days For Pharma Lowest rate of sales growth since 1961. Cholesterol drug market shrinks 15%. New, innovative medicines generate only $441 million, according to IMS Health.
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POPSNot So Fast This great investigation The Cleveland Plain Dealer illustrates how the badly named Fast Track designation many drug companies brag about often doesn't result in faster drugs or better outcomes, either for long-term investors or patients. Found via Pharmalot.
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POPSCancer Deaths Rise The death rate from cancer dropped slightly, but the total number of cancer deaths rose, according to the American Cancer Society.
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POPSGINA Finally Passes! Forbidding companies and insurers from using the results of genetic tests to deny people jobs and medical coverage is a big deal. Some of the top minds in genetics have been pushing for this law for a long time.
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POPSMore Pain For New Heart Drugs U.S. investors may not have been watching it closely, but TAK-475, a squaline synthase inhibitor, was viewed as one of the only promising new mechanisms in treating bad cholesterol levels left. It had been suggested that Pfizer or another big drugmaker might want to license the drug. This delay is yet another sign of how difficult inventing new blockbusters is getting.
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POPSDendreon Completes Study Enrollment This is expected, of course, but still important because Dendreon's prostate cancer immunotherapy, Provenge is a controversial drug. Experts disagree on whether a survival benefit seen in an after-the-fact analysis of previous trials is real. This study should end the debate, one way or another. One caution: The first analysis, next year, is a first look. Provenge will need to be very effective to make this hurdle. But it will get a second chance when the trial completes. This is one of a string of results expected for cancer immunotherapies over the next year.
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POPSSinguClar: Not Meant To Be The Don Quixote of respiratory therapeutics finally hangs up his sword. There will be no combo pill of Merck's Singulair and Schering's Claritin; apparently the combo is no better than either drug alone.
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POPSCelgene Buying Pharmion For $2.9 Billion This is a sensible move for Celgene, maker of the multiple myeloma drugs Thalomid and Revlimid, and a big payday for holders of Pharmion shares, which had already doubled this year.
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POPSUCB Yo-Yo's On Crohn's Drug News The biggest share fall in 17 years, followed by the biggest gain. An interesting nugget here is that the FDA and the European regulators apparently disagree on the drug's role. Click through to the Bloomberg story for more.
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POPSWhy The AIDS Vaccine Quest Must Go On As World AIDS Day approaches, Arthur Caplan, the University of Pennsylvania bioethicist, takes a look at the fallout from Merck's experimental HIV vaccine. The vaccine, for unknown reasons, actually made patients more likely to contract the virus. But Caplan says stopping the search for an AIDS vaccine would be a giant mistake.
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POPSTheStreet.com: Homeland Security Requires Gardasil Shots For Immigrants TheStreet.com has a really nice piece about a rather strange decision by the Department of Homeland Security to require immigrants to get a Gardasil shot -- although not the complete course required for full immunity. In the story, Gardasil maker Merck says it is not aware of the department's policies. Click the link for more.
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POPSMerck's Big Risk: High Expectations So much has gone so right for so long. Merck has executed well, but it has also gotten very lucky. For instance, its diabetes pill Januvia would not be such a big product were it not for both the safety problems plaguing GlaxoSmithKline's Avandia and the regulatory delay of Novartis' Galvus. Earnings forecasts have just kept going up. Should investors start to feel cautious? Or can Merck really keep delivering when other drug stocks are not?
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POPSTheravance Antibiotic Delayed Telavancin, a hospital antibiotic designed to replace vancomycin, is the lead drug for Theravance. The biotech, co-founded by famed Merck chief executive Roy Vagelos, was featured in a Forbes report on drug-resistant infections. Shares are down 5% in pre-market trading.
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POPSIs Medicine Haunted? The WSJ's Health Blog does a great job sussing out a suspected case of ghostwriting on the part of a communications firm hired by drugmaker Forest Laboratories. These kinds of cases crop up every so often, and they are disturbing because they make you wonder how much of the medical literature is written by drug companies and then foisted on scientific journals under the guise of more independent research. This just isn't how science is supposed to work. The names on the paper are supposed to accurately reflect the people who did the research.
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POPSIsn't It Ironic? Don't ya think? Cypress Biosciences got a bump from the approval of Eli Lilly's Cymbalta for fibromyalgia. Lilly shares dipped slightly.
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POPSWyeth and Elan: Reinventing the Wheel? Adam Feuerstein at TheStreet.com is asking a pointed question about the way Wyeth and Elan are conducting a big study of their Alzheimer's drug. Why, exactly, are the companies trying to design a new way to measure Alzheimer's symptoms, and is doing so really such a good idea?
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POPSOuch. Takeda drops its experimental cholesterol drug.
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POPSAmgen, J&J: It Could Have Been Worse The consensus here: After the battering these drugs have taken in the press and in the market, this could have been much worse. The companies and their investors can breathe a little sigh of relief.
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POPSAnother Blow For Cancer Vaccines An independent committee stops a study of Cell Genesys' GVAX because more patients died with the therapy than without. Cell Genesys shares drop below $1. This is yet another blow to a field that has been beset by trouble. Still in the game: the controversial Dendreon, with another ongoing study in prostate cancer, and GlaxoSmithKline, which has a huge cancer immunotherapy effort.
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POPSThe Platypus Has No Stomach A strange fact learned via Carl Zimmer, who got it from the journal Genome Biology. The platypus genome was the subject of much fanfare recenty. (It's amazing how many organisms are getting sequenced lately -- P&G actually funded the sequencing of the organism that causes dandruff.) It turns out some key genes involved in the digestion are missing, and that this shouldn't be surprising because the platypus apparently lost its stomach somewhere along the evolutionary path that led it away from other mammals. It seems to be alone among vertebrates in this strange feat.
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POPSScience, Sexism, and News Coverage Jon Eisen at UC Davis takes on a list of top biologists that neglected to include women, and also ignored much of biology. Off the top of my head, I'd add aging researcher Cynthia Kenyon and Genentech's Susan Desmond-Hellmann to the list. (Hey, DeCode Genetics CEO Kari Stefansson makes Newsweek's list...)
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