Author Archives: Walter Armstrong

Judge Throws The Book At Former Bristol-Myers Squibb Exec

By Walter Armstrong | Published: June 9, 2009
Media wordsmiths are competing to outdo one another today in punny reporting on the news that ex-BMS exec Andrew Bodnar has been sentenced to write a book about the role he played in the firm’s 2006 reverse-payments case over generic Plavix. “Pen-ance: Bristol-Myers Exec Gets Two Years of Hard Writing,” The Wall Street Journal Law Blog [...]
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Latest News from ASCO: Winners, Losers, and Also Rans

By Walter Armstrong | Published: June 3, 2009
Image via Wikipedia Due to pharma’s voluntary moratorium on doling out totefuls of freebies and all the lattes you can swallow, thousands of docs, researchers, and reporters had only their sleep-deprived selves to carry from data dump to data dump at this week’s American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) annual confab in Orlando, Florida. Some 4,000 studies [...]
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Gilead Buys CV Therapeutics (Update 1)

By Walter Armstrong | Published: March 16, 2009
The morning’s other big M&A news comes out of the Bay Area biotech industry, where Gilead Sciences announced that it will purchase CV Therapeutics for $1.4 billion. The sudden move frees Palo Alto-based cardiovascular company CV Therapeutics from the hostile embrace of Astellas Pharma, ending a messy $1.1 billion takeover attempt. With the acquisition, Gilead, [...]
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Gilead Making a Bundle

By Walter Armstrong | Published: February 10, 2009
Gilead Sciences has once again proven that independent biotechs can innovate with the best of Big Pharma. The Silicon Valley company’s wizardry at weaving multiple drugs into a single weft enabled it to overthrow GlaxoSmithKline as king of HIV in 2007. Yesterday, at the 16th annual Congress of Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI), the biotech [...]
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Wyeth v. Levine: Inside the Preemption Case

By Walter Armstrong | Published: November 10, 2008
Last week, the Supreme Court heard arguments in the long-awaited preemption case, Wyeth v. Levine. For the first time, the highest court in the land is weighing in on whether federal approval of a drug preempts tort claims against a drugmaker, such as an injured consumer might bring in a state court. A decision for [...]
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