After Merck & Co. officially announced its $41.1 billion merger with Schering-Plough yesterday, CEO Richard Clark made it clear his company is still looking to expand through further acquisitions and mergers.

According to the Wall Street Journal’s Health Blog:

Clark told us today that the newly combined company  is “actively looking” for biotechs to buy or partner with…“We’ve gone much more external,” he said. As Clark noted, the combined company will generate about $15 billion in free cash flow each year to go hunting.

He also told the Associated Press that Merck already has $8 billion in cash it plans to use for future deals. The Schering-Plough merger makes Merck the second biggest company in the industry, and the deal comes on the heels of industry leader Pfizer’s deal earlier this year to buy drugmaker Wyeth.

By purchasing Schering-Plough, Merck hopes to benefit from the company’s biotech, animal care and consumer products divisions. The move expands Merck’s worldwide operations to encompass 140 countries and will help to soften the blow when Merck loses its patent on Singulair, the allergy drug that produces over $4 billion a year for the company.

Clark didn’t put forward information on layoffs expected to affect 16,000 employees, 15 percent of the companies’ combined workforce. Approximately 40 percent of Schering-Plough’s senior leaders will join the combined company, according to Merck’s press release, while Schering-Plough CEO Fred Hassan is leaving with a severance package reportedly worth $51 million.

“The one area we’re trying not to engage is specific questions about disease state,” said Earl Whipple, senior director in AstraZeneca’s corporate communications group and author of the blog.

Strict corporate control by pharma companies engaged in social media essentially destroys what makes the space so dynamic: the ability for users to express controversial information and personal opinions. Therefore, it’s no wonder that company-controlled blogs struggle to develop active communities, especially as they are pitted against private blogs and message boards where users can freely express their views.

The true downside of such close corporate scrutiny is that it drives patients to Web sites with imperfect or erroneous information that can adversely affect their healthcare decisions. Yet because pharma companies are leery of risking an FDA violation for offering incomplete information amid unclear Internet regulations, that is where patients go.

Luckily, FDA seems to recognize that there is a problem. On November 12–13, the agency will convene in Washington, DC, to discuss regulations governing pharma communications on the Web; it’s possible that relaxed regulations (should they emerge from the November meetings) will encourage companies like AstraZeneca to offer more social media content. Until then, however, it’s impossible for pharma companies to create an online community with the most comprehensive information available.

For instance, AZ Healthcare Connections’ comments policy may create a chilling effect on potential commenters—though it is the standard policy for pharma-produced blogs. It reads, in part, “We may not publish comments that could be misleading or confusing, or thinly disguised sales pitches for other products or services… We want to hear your stories, viewpoints and opinions—even if they are contradictory to ours.”

“In order to share accurate and relevant information on our company and key issues, we need to be part of the conversations [that are] happening,” said Whipple.

The question is: How exactly do you correct misconceptions about a product if they can’t be mentioned?

So far there have been no comments on the AZ blog. Besides the introductory post, the blog offers only company-line stances on FDA social media regulation and healthcare reform. If content can’t generate the type of product discourse pharma companies are looking for, perhaps a new approach to social media is needed to educate customers in an ethical and productive way.

At the gala ceremony for the 2009 Prix Galien USA award on October 1, a paradigm shift in drug development took center stage.

“The most successful new [cancer] therapies will be based on a precise molecular understanding of disease basis—that’s exactly what we did with Gleevec,” said keynote speaker Brian Druker, director of the Oregon Health and Science University Knight Cancer Institute, who played a major role in the discovery of the “magic cancer bullet” that is one of the most successful drug’s of the decade. Accordingly, Novartis’ Gleevec (imatinib mesylate), a kinase inhibitor that stops the protein that causes chronic myeloid leukemia, received the award for Best Pharmaceutical Product.

Druker’s speech considered the benefits of collaboration between the drug industry and academics in solving scientific conundrums. “Basic science can actually advance an undruggable target to a druggable target. It is my view that investment in science in large consortiums can move the ball forward much faster than each of us can do alone,” he said.

Druker even went so far as to propose a new system of conducting clinical trials: “We need a complete new branch of science—a branch that I’ll call human investigation—to investigate patients with the same level of scientific detail that we put into our basic science.”

Druker’s visionary proposals, delivered in the appropriately inspired setting of the American Museum of Natural History’s “Whale Room,” met with polite applause from the black-tie crowd celebrating the industry’s most innovative branded products. The translational-medicine model that brought Gleevec from lab bench to patient bedside in near-record time is the glittering exception that proves the glum rule of high-risk pharma R&D. Many of the drugs nominated this year are the product of decades-long research and billion-dollar investment, some working off of discoveries made nearly 50 years ago.

Two drugs approved last year by FDA for the treatment of the rare disease idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura (ITP) shared the Best Biotechnology Product honor: Amgen’s, Nplate (romiplostin), and Promacta (eltrombopag), a collaboration between GlaxoSmithKline and Ligand Pharmaceuticals. Both products were developed under the orphan-drug designation.

In recognition of the increasing role that diagnostics play in clinical practice, the Prix Galien USA gave its first Best Medical Technology award. The winner was Veridex’s CellSearch System, the first device able to identify and count circulating tumor cells (CTCs) in blood samples to help predict survival in patients with metastatic breast, colorectal or prostate cancer.

The committee presented its Pro Bono Humanum Awards to two pioneers in the burgeoning global-health movement, Dr. Barry Bloom, an immunologist and professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, was recognized for his work to eradicate disease by understanding immune response to infectious diseases including leprosy, TB and malaria. Jeffrey Sachs, an economist and director of the Earth Institute a Columbia University, was awarded for his work on Millennium Villages, the U.N.’s public/private partnership project that helps rural African communities lift themselves out of poverty by providing financial and health care support.

The Prix Galien Award was established in 1970 by French pharmacist Roland Mehl and inaugurated in the United States in 2007. Pharmaceutical Executive is the media sponsor of the event.

Visit Prix Galien’s website for more information.

The Prix Galien USA committee was inaugurated in 2007 as the industry’s equivalent of a Nobel Prize. The award honors innovation by organizations and researchers developing drugs and therapy for worldwide use. The Pro Bono Humanum award is also given to a person or group that has improved the worldwide human condition through the use of pharmaceutical science. 2009 winners include Novartis, Amgen, and GlaxoSmithKline.

Bell opened the talk, discussing the lessons learned by Alexion during the development of Soliris, a groundbreaking drug that combats rare blood disease PNH. He found that innovation took place as a result of a well-designed long-term development process with public support, allowing the company to distribute the drug free of charge to the uninsured.

Sachs spoke next, discussing the difficulties developing economies face from the burden of disease. “We should not be leaving 8.8 million children to die each year,” he said of the developed world’s lack of support to public health in Africa. He continued to posit that if ten cents out of every hundred dollars made in the developed world were donated to support Africa, those 8.8 million deaths could be prevented.

Bloom followed by voicing his concern that rich countries have not solved the problem of social responsibility. Without rewarding researchers for investigating diseases that may not ensure a big payday at the of the development cycle, he said, true progress against disease cannot be made on a global level.