If you’re a CEO about to lose your single biggest source of sales, and you’re sitting on billions in cash and short-term investments, it might be time to go shopping.
If you’re the CEO of Pfizer — which will face generic competition for Lipitor in 2011, and which holds cash and short term investments worth more [...]

Popularity: 3% [?]

A group of researchers say that they have uncovered a pathway that modulates cell loss and survival in Parkinson’s. Working with a mouse model of the disease and cell cultures, they found that an accumulation of alpha-synuclein interferes with cells’ recycling of a protein called MEF2D, leading to cell death.
Parkinson’s is characterized by clumps of [...]

Popularity: 4% [?]

Cancer cells cheat death by reversing a process which causes normal cells to commit suicide at the end of their natural life, scientists have shown.
They showed cancer cells were able to recover even after exposure to a chemical cocktail which triggers suicide in normal cells.
The ability may help cancer cells to block the effect of [...]

Popularity: 4% [?]

Biotech company Celgene Corp. on Wednesday sent a letter to doctors warning that a study of its drug to treat dangerous blood clots suggests it may increase the risk of death in elderly patients.
The letter, posted late Wednesday on the Web site of the Food and Drug Administration, recommends that doctors consider alternatives to Innohep [...]

Popularity: 3% [?]

Even after a drug’s been on the market for years and taken by millions of people, regulators often have to rely on data from clinical trials — which involve only a few thousand people — to gauge whether a drug presents serious safety risks. That can be a big problem for hazards that are relatively [...]

Popularity: 4% [?]

The UK National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence issued new guidelines to improve access to life-extending drug therapies for individuals facing terminal illnesses, under certain circumstances. NICE ruled that the current threshold at which a drug is deemed cost-effective can now be extended for patients with rare terminal illnesses, including certain types of cancer.

For [...]

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The FDA approved more new drugs in 2008 than in any of the previous three years, The Wall Street Journal reported. The agency approved 24 “first-of-a-kind” drugs last year, compared with 18 in 2007, 22 in 2006 and 20 in 2005, in addition to authorising dozens of other applications for new formulations or new uses [...]

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FDA sanctioned Roche Molecular Diagnostics’ cobas TaqScreen MPX Test that screens for three types of HIV as well as HCV and HBV in donated blood plasma and tissue. It is a qualitative nucleic acid in vitro test for comprehensive single-assay detection of HIV-1 Group M RNA, HIV-1 Group O RNA, HIV-2 RNA, HCV RNA, and [...]

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When the data from various studies associating DNA repair genes with cancer risk was combined, few of these variants were truly associated with increased cancer risk, according to a team of investigators from the University of Ioannina School of Medicine in Greece. Of the 241 variants studied, they found two that were statistically significant: XRCC1 [...]

Popularity: 7% [?]

A look at this year’s biggest deals shows that a few core players were doing most of the spending. GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) stole three of the top-five spots. While these transactions are worth a lot of money on paper, big chunks of the promised dollars depend on successful development, full approval, and sales levels.

GlaxoSmithKline’s deal with [...]

Popularity: 8% [?]