Residents in Princeton, N.J., have sued the municipality and Princeton University, saying the school should lose its tax-exempt status because it shares drug royalties with faculty. The case could have major repercussions for research universities.
Indianapolis-based Harlan Laboratories may violate loan covenants in the next three to six months, and its ability to refinance a $280 million loan that matures in July 2014 is “highly questionable,” according to a report by Moody’s Investors Service. It’s unclear if the privately held company has an escape plan brewing. Harlan Laboratories employs about 330 people in the area and has annual sales of $326 million. The company appeared on the verge of pulling off a $305 million refinancing in February, but the deal fell apart and was shelved in April, according to Standard & Poor’s Ratings Corp. The ratings agencies say the company is not performing well enough to attract lenders. And even if it could engineer a refinancing, it likely would struggle to make the required payments. By Moody’s tally, Harlan’s “adjusted debt” is a whopping 7-1/2 times its so-called EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization).
Indianapolis-area hospitals are billing patients insured by their employers 264 percent more for outpatient services than what the federal Medicare program would pay for the same services for the same patients in the same facilities. That’s what researchers at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Studying Health System Change found when they analyzed claims data for 590,000 patients, all below the age of 65, who were covered in 2011 by the union-negotiated health plans at automakers General Motors, Ford and Chrysler. The study was paid for by an organization that is funded by the automakers, the UAW and the International Union. The study compared the claims from 13 metro areas against one anther, all of them in the Midwest. Indianapolis had the highest hospital outpatient prices among all cities and the second-highest inpatient prices, behind only Kansas City. Interestingly, Kokomo had the third-highest inpatient prices and the second-highest outpatient prices. Physician prices in Indianapolis were in the middle of the pack, about 10 percent to 20 percent higher than Medicare prices. The authors of the study say hospitals’ market power, which has increased in recent years due to consolidation among hospitals and doctors, is the most likely explanation for the higher prices.
New Jersey-based Covance Inc. has formed a collaboration with the Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute to conduct early-stage clinical trials for biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies. The Indiana CTSI, which was formed by partnership of Indiana, Purdue and Notre Dame universities, will provide access to a 13,606-square-foot, 24-patient facility at IU Health University Hospital in Indianapolis. The institute also could, if needed, expand operations into a recently renovated 33,078-square-foot, 50-patient facility in the same building. This space reopens to clinical research for the first time in six years due to the efforts of the Indiana CTSI. The alliance between Covance and the Indiana CTSI was facilitated by BioCrossroads, an Indianapolis-based life sciences business development group. Covance already conducts Phase 1 clinical trials at an 80-bed facility in Evansville. But there has been a paucity of Phase 1 clinical trial work in Indianapolis since locally based drugmaker Eli Lilly and Co. shut down its clinic at the IU School of Medicine in 2007.
A Miami man who helped carry out the theft of about $90 million in prescription drugs from a Eli Lilly warehouse in Connecticut pleaded guilty Monday to similar thefts in Florida, Kentucky and Virginia.
With a half-dozen new products lined up for approval within two years, the fight to win the growing $22 billion U.S. diabetes market is expected to intensify.
The nonstop connection to Silicon Valley that Indianapolis’ tech community has been clamoring for is here, but a leading advocate for the service said it doesn’t meet his industry’s needs.
By year end, the St. Vincent Health hospital system will spin off its New Hope organization for Hoosiers with development disabilities. St. Vincent New Hope will become a stand-alone organization that will continue to run group homes for its patients. New Hope started offering counseling, day programs and residential housing in 1978. About a decade later, St. Vincent joined forces with New Hope. St. Vincent Health will make a cash infusion to New Hope and also donate to New Hope more than 38 central Indiana group home properties. Jim Van Dyke, executive director of St.Vincent New Hope, said in a prepared statement, “This new phase in our history will allow us to implement even stronger programs that will enable New Hope to continue serving our clients well into the future.”
Major health insurers, including WellPoint Inc., are in line for another year of growth, thanks to Obamacare, according to Bloomberg News. Bloomberg cited Barclays Capital analyst Joshua Raskin, who in a research note late last week said the Medicaid expansion funded by Obamacare should help drive enrollment growth next year, and the health insurance exchanges in each state will wind up being a "very small" influence. WellPoint shares rose 57 cents Monday morning to $89.66 each.
Admissions at Indiana University Health hospitals in the first half of the year dipped 4.3 percent, prompting IU Health executives to give pink slips to about 800 employees, according to an announcement Thursday morning. Meanwhile, however, IU Health's business is stronger than ever, with income from operations shooting up nearly 20 percent in the first half of the year.IU Health currently has 36,000 employees, although many of them work part time. Its full-time-equivalent work force totals 27,000. For all of 2012, IU Health had revenue of $5.6 billion. IU Health’s decision comes less than three months after Indianapolis-based St. Vincent Health laid off 865 workers in late June, which was part of a 5,000-worker layoff by its parent organization, St. Louis-based Ascension Health Alliance. IU Health CEO Dan Evans said in an April interview that the hospital system is trying to cut $1 billion in expenses by 2017. So far, IU Health has been able to offset its decline in hospital admissions with an 8-percent price increase and by receiving more patient visits to its outpatient facilities. Excluding one-time items, IU Health income from operations rose 19 percent in the first half of 2013 compared to the same period in 2012. IU Health pulled in $186.3 million during those six months, compared with $156.6 million the year before. Inpatient admissions—those involving an overnight stay—had been climbing consistently throughout 2012. But then, in January, they started to fall.
Indiana University is cutting about 50 hourly workers at its Bloomington campus and shifting that work to a temporary staffing agency. Spokesman Mark Land said the move was in the works, but was accelerated so IU could avoid having to add those workers to the IU health insurance plan as required by the federal health care overhaul if they average more than 30 hours a week. Land told The Herald-Times that shifting 50 of the physical plant department's 650 jobs will also relieve the administrative task of managing the hours of seasonal workers. IU will have the Manpower agency hire the maintenance and custodial personnel after Sept. 28. The university will pay the agency an administrative fee to manage the workers.
Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly and Co. sued Canada last week, seeking $500 million in damages because the drugmaker thinks Canada’s courts violated the North American Free Trade Agreement by invalidating patents on two Lilly drugs. According to CBC News, Lilly had sought relief from Canada through arbitration, but will now take its complaint before a three-member tribunal. Lilly is suing because Canadian courts struck down some of its patents on its former bestseller Zyprexa, an antipsychotic medication, and on Strattera, a medicine to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. Lilly says the court rulings, issues from 2009 to 2011, cost Lilly hundreds of millions in sales because they allowed cheaper generic versions of the drugs to undercut Lilly’s brand-name products sooner than would have otherwise occurred. "Patent decisions in Canada over the last decade not only fly in the face of long-established international standards, but they're subjective and completely unpredictable," Doug Norman, general patent counsel for Eli Lilly, said in a prepared statement.
The group that oversees Indiana’s economic development initiatives for life sciences, information technology, transportation and clean technology is moving toward a fifth thrust focused on nutrition.
Part of the funding will go to an existing study of drugs from Eli Lilly and Co. and others to see whether they can ward off the disease in people who inherited genes that predestine them to get Alzheimer’s.
City officials are quietly trying to orchestrate what would be a major coup: Landing Cummins as an office anchor for a second phase of redevelopment on the former home of Market Square Arena.
Eli Lilly and Co. is counting on the quality of a diversified product portfolio over boosting its sales forces to grab a bigger slice of the $22 billion U.S. diabetes market, a difference in strategy to some of its rivals.
The YMCA of Greater Indianapolis wants to build an 87,000-square-foot mixed-use development on a parking lot owned by Eli Lilly and Co. at the southwest corner of Alabama and South streets.
Eli Lilly said a potential breast cancer treatment missed its main goal in a late-stage study. However, the drugmaker will seek approval to use the treatment in stomach cancer patients after ramucirumab performed better in a separate study.
Elona went into receivership in June after Greenwood officials filed a foreclosure lawsuit against the firm. The company failed after receiving more than $8 million in economic development incentives from the city over the past three years.
Cancer drug Erbitux extended the lives of patients with a form of advanced colon cancer more than seven months longer than those taking Roche Holding AG’s Avastin.
The federal Medicare program has decided, at least for now, not to reimburse health care providers who conduct diagnostic imaging tests using an Eli Lilly and Co. imaging agent that can help identify the presence of Alzheimer’s disease. Medicare will pay for those scans if they are part of a clinical trial of a drug and will consider paying for broader use in the future. But Indianapolis-based Lilly, as well as the Chicago-based Alzheimer’s Association, had been hoping for wider reimbursement now. The Alzheimer’s Association noted that it typically takes seven years for a procedure to move from clinical-trial-only reimbursement to broad reimbursement. The narrower use of Lilly’s agent, which is called Amyvid, is a small hit financially for Lilly. The bigger impact is that Lilly hoped wide use of Amyvid could help it and other companies bring drugs to market to treat Alzheimer’s. Since there are currently no effective treatments for the disease, any drug that did help with treatment would be an instant blockbuster. Lilly’s experimental drug solanezumab could have sales topping $4 billion annually if it proves effective in patients with mild Alzheimer’s disease. The drug failed its clinical trials last year when tested in a mix of mild and moderate Alzheimer’s patients, but it showed encouraging results in patients with only mild Alzheimer’s disease. The only way to identify such patients is by using a special kind of imaging test that will show deposits of a protein called amyloid—which is one of two telltale signs of Alzheimer’s disease. The imaging test is called PET, or positron emission tomography. Before Amyvid, however, the only way to view these plaques was during an autopsy.
Cancer drug Erbitux, which is partly owned by Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly and Co., extended the lives of patients with a form of advanced colon cancer more than seven months longer than those taking Roche Holding AG’s Avastin, according to clinical trial results released Saturday. According to Bloomberg News, the results were presented at a scientific conference in Europe by Germany-based Merck KGaA, which sells the medicine outside North America. Lilly and New York-based Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. market the drug in the United States. Erbitux generated sales for Merck of $1.2 billion last year, while Lilly realized $400 million in revenue from the drug in 2012. According to Bloomberg, the findings suggest that Erbitux, already approved in Europe as a treatment for patients with so-called KRAS wild-type tumors, may have a role in a subgroup of patients with so-called RAS wild-type cancer.
Purdue University chemistry professor Graham Cooks, whose research has played a role in the launch of several Indiana startups, was awarded the 2013 Dreyfus Prize in Chemical Sciences, the highest award possible for a chemist, during a ceremony last week. Cooks won the prize and its $250,000 payment for his innovations in the fields of mass spectrometry and analytical chemistry. Cooks and his team have fine-tuned the tools for molecular imaging for cancer diagnostics and surgery; therapeutic drug monitoring; testing for biomarkers in urine; and the identification of food-borne pathogens, bacteria, pesticides and explosives residues. His research has contributed to the technology developed by Griffin Analytical Technologies Inc., Prosolia, Inc. and InProteo LLC.
In a big disappointment, Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly and Co. reported that its experimental cancer drug ramucirumab proved no better than a placebo as a treatment for breast cancer. According to the Associated Press, the Indianapolis-based firm no longer plans to seek regulatory approval for the drug as a treatment for patients with a form of breast cancer that has spread. However, Lilly will seek approval to use ramucirumab in combination with chemotherapy in stomach cancer patients after ramucirumab performed better in a separate study on those patients. Ramucirumab extended both overall and progression-free survival times for patients with advanced gastric cancer. Lilly will seek approval from regulators for that use. It also is studying ramucirumab in colorectal and lung cancers and expects more late-stage research results next year. Ramucirumab is one of Lilly’s best hopes to produce new revenue to offset the loss of sales it has been suffering since the 2011 patent expirations on its then-best-seller, Zyprexa, and the patent expiration coming at year’s end on its current best seller, Cymbalta.
Eli Lilly and Co. said Thursday that meeting its sale target will be a challenge. It plans to repurchase $5 billion in shares and introduce new diabetes drugs to help navigate through patent losses. Another immediate hurdle: Obamacare.
Butler’s 5-year-old, student-managed investment fund is believed to be the single largest such fund among colleges in Indiana. That big pot of money brings pressure on students.
Psoriasis is linked to higher rates of heart disease and diabetes, and a third of patients also develop a form of arthritis. About 125 million people worldwide have the skin condition, including 7.5 million Americans.
Bring in the relationship experts to label this one. St. Vincent Health and Monroe Hospital in Bloomington have pulled back from their “strategic alignment”—which had St. Vincent managing Monroe’s operations but was a step short of a merger—and will instead settle for a clinical partnership for cardiology, orthopedic and critical care services. Longtime St. Vincent executive Joe Roche, who had led the attempt to integrate the systems, will now become the CEO of Monroe Hospital, starting Monday. “We are appreciative for the opportunity to have explored integration options with Monroe Hospital, and to continue our clinical partnerships to serve the residents of Bloomington and surrounding communities,” Ian Worden, interim CEO of St. Vincent Health, said in a prepared statement. The Bloomington market is dominated by St. Vincent’s archrival, Indianapolis-based Indiana University Health, which owns IU Health Bloomington Hospital there. Monroe, which boasts 32 inpatient beds, was having financial difficulties and had been looking at a partnership with Franciscan St. Francis Health before it struck its deal with St. Vincent last year.
Less-than-expected profit in emerging markets and a decline in the Japanese yen could make it difficult for Eli Lilly and Co. to meet a goal of at least $20 billion in revenue next year, the Indianapolis-based drugmaker said Thursday. But the company said it would cut costs, if necessary, to reach its other 2014 goals of $3 billion in profit and $4 billion in operating cash flow. “I am confident in our outlook to return to a period of growth and expanding margins,” Chief Financial Officer Derica Rice said in a statement. Lilly will also take a hit from Obamacare. The 2010 law, known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, required drugmakers to give larger rebates to federally funded health plans and will add a tax onto all U.S. sales of prescription drugs. Those impacts, as well as Obamacare's elimination of a tax benefit for retiree drug coverage, will cost Lilly about $500 million this year. But Lilly might also see its sales hampered by the Obamacare exchanges, the online marketplaces that started Tuesday in all 50 states. That's because health insurers, in an attempt to keep premiums low, are creating narrower formularies that exclude some drugs from coverage. Similarly, insurers are creating "narrow networks" that offer coverage for fewer doctors and hospitals.
Indiana University Health plans to eliminate 935 workers in Indianapolis, Carmel, Fishers and Muncie, according to documents filed by the hospital system with the state. The cuts will affect 746 in Indianapolis at Methodist Hospital, Riley Hospital for Children, University Hospital and IU Health Physicians. In Carmel, 67 will be cut at IU Health North Hospital. Two will be trimmed at Saxony Hospital in Fishers. In Muncie, IU Health plans 120 cuts at Ball Memorial Hospital. IU Health employs about 36,000 statewide. It says it's looking to save $1 billion in costs over the next four years. The Indianapolis-based system said last month it must make the cuts because fewer patients have been coming to hospitals, and payment rates for its services have been declining.
In a series of presentations, Lilly executives stretched themselves in four directions at once to convince investors and stock analysts that the company will bend but not break next year, and then snap back stronger than ever in 2015.
