Guest post by BullPharma (Portugal) :
The world is changing, and more and more challenges are in front of the Pharmaceutical Industry. In our day-to-day business vocabulary some words are mandatory – globalization, crisis, cost …
Two very positive announcements were made last week by Andrew Witty, chief executive of Galxo SmithKline. The first covers the price of medicines in developing nations which he said Glaxo would cap at no more than 25% of the price in the developed world. The second interesting point was the call to establish a patent pool for diseases, such as malaria and cholera, which affect developing nations. Such diseases are generally not profitable for large pharma companies and thus get very little research funding. This patent pool, to which Mr. Witty is calling other pharma companies to make patent contributions also, would make it easier for third party researchers and non-profit organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (see video below) to develop novel treatments. Reuters quotes Mr. Witty as saying “Society expects us to do more in addressing these issues. To be frank, I agree. We have the capacity to do more and we can do more.” Wow, it looks like big pharma is slowly realizing the fact that they’re into public healthcare and not just profit - now if only the shareholders and the stock market would find it in them to come to the same realization. The important question for them is how much this will reduce Glaxo’s profit, if at all ? This is a question we haven’t seen asked in either the Reuters or the otherwise excellent Guardian article.
You can’t imagine our surprise today when we saw that Pfizer has announced that it will license injectable and solid dosage forms from Aurobindo. We wrote about Pfizer’s new generics strategy on monday, but we …
“If you can’t beat them, join them”. So goes the old saying that is proving more true day-by-day in the pharma industry. A few years ago it would have been unthinkable that Pfizer, the world’s …
Two very positive announcements were made last week by Andrew Witty, chief executive of Galxo SmithKline. The first covers the price of medicines in developing nations which he said Glaxo would cap at no more …
Even as patents on huge blockbuster drugs are still expiring, the smart generics companies have been preparing for some time for a future in which there are fewer and fewer syntehsized molecules to copy and …
Following the death of Mr. Merckle, the sale of his empire continues at a swift pace. The Independent is reporting that Phoenix UK, with a turnover of €1.2bn and controlling 15 per cent of the …
The first generics casualty of the financial crisis was Ratiopharm which is now being sold my the Merckle family to make up for their recent stock market losses. Now Actavis, the fifth largest generics company …
We were shocked today to read that the owner of both Ratiopharm, one of Europe’s largest generics companies and Phoenix PharmaHandel, Europe’s 2nd largest drug distributor, has committed suicide as a result of having lost …
You know the big-pharma club is in trouble when most of its members are jumping ship from fighting against generics to producing generics themselves. Novartis, GSK, Sanofi and Daiichi are just a few examples of …
Despite all the positive awareness-building campaigns run by generics companies all over the world, there still remains a persistent stigma amongst patients and even some doctors that generic medicines are in some way different or …
Adolf Merckle, the owner of the privately held Ratiopharm, one of the worlds largest generics manufacturers, has gotten himself into a whole world of trouble over his attempts to short-sell Volkswagen shares recently. His play …