Roche Holding AG missed full-year profit forecasts due to disappointing sales of key cancer drugs and gave a Lackluster outlook for 2010, pointing up the wider challenges facing global drugmakers.
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Roche has focused on developing promising new drugs rather than cutting costs as a way to combat looming patent losses, but still faces some of the [...]

Ahead of Wednesday’s advisory committee meeting, FDA staffers have raised questions about Cell Therapeutics’ lymphoma drug pixantrone. The developer is hoping to market the therapy, also known as Pixuvri, as a treatment for patients with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma that hasn’t responded to other treatments.
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The agency has concerns about both the drug’s effectiveness as well as its safety [...]

Experiments on mice may help scientists understand the workings of the prion protein linked to brain disease vCJD.
Swiss researchers say there is evidence that prions play a vital role in the maintenance of the sheath surrounding our nerves.
They say it is possible that an absence of prions causes diseases of the peripheral nervous system.
One expert [...]

Proxy season! Time, once again, to learn how much the captains of industry are pulling down.
First up for the Health Blog this year is Eli Lilly, which just filed its preliminary proxy.
John Lechleiter, the company’s CEO, had a package totaling $16.4 million, according to an analysis by Dow Jones Newswires. That includes $1.48 million in [...]

The popular antidepressant drug Paxil may interfere with breast cancer treatments, making patients more likely to relapse and die, researchers in Canada reported on Monday.
Women who took GlaxoSmithKline’s Paxil while taking tamoxifen at the same time were more likely to die of their breast cancer, the researchers found. The longer the overlap between Paxil and [...]