If there’s one piece of pharma news that should come as no surprise, it’s FDA throwing a new drug back at its maker with a “Try again later.” After all, the agency spent last year handing out “approvable” letters like pharma hands out freebies. That’s why we’re surprised that analysts, reporters, and possibly […]

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The New York Times likes to give the drug industry a hard time with its (unbranded) scandal of the week series—off-label promoting, suppressing data, that sort of thing. But when the 2008 Pulitzer Prizes were handed out on Monday, the winner for best investigative reporting was a series by the Times that even its harshest […]

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The discussions over the next model for pharma fall all over the map, but include one central component: a conversation with consumers. How to do it? Here, Megan Svensen, executive vice president of healthcare for Marina Maher Communications, reports in from the annual Public Relations Society of America boot camp on healthcare.
I’m coming to you […]

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Looks like everyone is fair game on the Comedy Central show South Park–even Big Pharma. In one of the show’s funniest and most irreverent episodes to date, Eric Cartman (the potty-mouthed chubby kid with the poof-ball hat) becomes infected with HIV during a routine tonsillectomy. And it turns out nobody cares.
Eric goes on an adventure […]

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After weeks of questions and few answers, FDA has identified the contaminant in batches of Baxter’s blood-thinner heparin as over-sulfated chondroitin sulfate, a modified version of a biologically derived compound not found in heparin.
The over-sulfated compound found in the batches is unnatural and is more than likely chemically modified, Janet Woodcock, director of FDA’s Center […]

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Less than 24 hours after skewering CEO Jeffrey Kindler (right) in the press following Pfizer’s dismal Analyst Day, Wall Street’s large-cap analysts have done a stunning turnaround. In a rare show of remorse at their pitiless pile-on, these freshly contrite gurus of the pharma sector have declared the next five business days “Be Kinder to […]

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We read a lot of critiques of the pharma industry, and frankly many of them leave a lot to be desired in terms of logic, clarity, and thoughtfulness.
For an example of the opposite—a truly clear and scorching attack, let us recommend to you a document prepared by Dr. Joseph Glenmullen, a Clinical Instructor in Psychiatry […]

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Vytorin Scripts Plummet
In the wake of the ENHANCE study, new prescriptions of the cholesterol-lowering drug Vytorin are dropping drastically, but calls to sales reps by physicians are on the rise.
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Vermont Amends Data Mining Law
After watching similar legislation barring data mining for Rx info get shut down in Maine and New Hampshire, […]

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Here are this week’s top news stories, as reported on PharmExec.com:
FDA Puts Kibosh on DTC User Fee Program
In a surprising but not completely unexpected move, FDA announced last week that its DTC user fee program was dead on arrival. Feds cite lack of funding as main reason.
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Vytorin Study Causes Media Stir, […]

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Don’t miss the current issue of Fast Company magazine, which features a look at a fascinating new program at Pfizer. It seems that in the wake of the company’s deep layoffs, Jordan Cohen, senior director of organizational effectiveness, started looking at what executives were doing and discovered that lots of it consisted of menial tasks—researching, […]

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