Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. and Eli Lilly and Co. were ordered to pay a combined $9 billion after a federal court jury found they hid the cancer risks of their Actos diabetes medicine in the first U.S. trial of its kind.
Court win last week in a patent challenge to lung cancer drug Alimta pushed Lilly shares higher than they’ve ever been since April 2007. Since then, the company’s pipeline has produced more misfires than the villains in a James Bond movie
If Indiana hospitals want an expansion of insurance coverage for low-income Hoosiers, Gov. Mike Pence thinks they should contribute toward the hundreds of millions of dollars it would cost. The Pence administration has started discussions with hospital leaders to use an existing program known as the Hospital Assessment Fee to generate money to help the state cover costs it would incur under an expansion of health coverage to as many as 400,000 Hoosiers. That expansion, called for by President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, did not happen in Indiana this year, as it did in 26 other states, in large part due to Pence’s concerns about the fiscal impact on the state. The health insurance expansion would be paid for entirely by the federal government in 2015 and 2016, but then require state contributions that could rise to $393 million per year by 2020, according to estimates by the actuarial firm Milliman Inc. Other elements of Obamacare are estimated to cost state government $123 million per year by 2020. The Hospital Assessment Fee effectively taxes hospitals to provide the state government with the funds needed to raise its reimbursement rates for Medicaid patients. When the state does that, the federal government increases its 2-for-1 matching funds to support the Indiana Medicaid program. Hospitals end up getting twice as much in new revenue as they pay out in assessments. Doug Leonard, president of the Indiana Hospital Association, said hospitals are open to Pence’s approach, but are waiting until the idea is fleshed out and numbers are attached.
Indiana University Health was chosen by a Wisconsin hospital system to provide heart and aorta surgeries there after surgeons the hospital system had been using were employed by a competing provider. Wisconsin-based ProHealth Care will pay the salaries of the three IU Health surgeons who will work in ProHealth’s Waukesha Memorial Hospital, which is midway between Milwaukee and Madison. ProHealth performs more than 400 cardiothoracic surgeries each year. IU Health performs more than 1,900 cardiothoracic surgeries at its 19 hospitals in Indiana. “The goal for the two health systems is to collaborate to establish and oversee a premier surgery program in Waukesha that will incorporate the clinical protocols, care pathways and quality metrics that have been the foundation of IU Health’s nationally ranked cardiovascular program,” IU Health spokesman Gene Ford said in an email. IU Health said it would evaluate similar opportunities, but stopped short of saying it is making out-of-state partnerships a business strategy.
Eli Lilly and Co. is in a three-way race to introduce a new kind of breast cancer drug, which at least one analyst thinks could become a $6 billion-a-year blockbuster. According to Bloomberg News, Indianapolis-based Lilly, New York-based Pfizer Inc. and Switzerland-based Novartis AG all presented data on Sunday about experimental drugs that stopped growth of breast cancer tumors. Pfizer’s drug, palbociclib, stopped tumor growth for 20.2 months in advanced forms of hormone-related breast cancer, twice the time seen with an older therapy by itself. Lilly’s bemaciclib stopped tumor growth for an average of 9.1 months. Doctors told Bloomberg that the new class of drugs, called CDK inhibitors, offers the first major new therapy in a decade for patients whose breast cancer fails to respond to other treatments. Mark Schoenebaum, an ISI Group analyst in New York, predicted Pfizer’s drug could generate peak sales of $6 billion a year.
Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller filed Medicaid fraud charges April 2 against Sally Metzner, 57, owner of Anderson Dental Center, and eight of her employees. According to the Associated Press, the charges allege Metzner and her employees started a scheme in 2006 to submit false and inflated claims for payment of dental services to the Indiana Medicaid program, sometimes using forged documents, to receive more than $300,000 in ineligible Medicaid payments. The allegedly fraudulent billing continued even after state, federal and local authorities executed the first of three search warrants at the clinic, the attorney general's office said. For example, instead of billing Medicaid $30 for the routine use of the anesthesia nitrous oxide, the practice allegedly billed it as a $125 intravenous procedure known as "deep sedation.”
Dr. Martha Dwenger joined Northwest Radiology Network on April 1. Dwenger previously worked for Columbus Radiology, Columbus Diagnostic Imaging, and as contract radiologist for Northwest Radiology since 2006. She earned a bachelor’s degree at Indiana State University and did her medical training at the Indiana University School of Medicine.
Indianapolis-based consulting organization YourEncore has hired Dr. Tim Franson as its chief medical officer. Most recently, Franson was a principal in the health and biosciences practice at FaegreBD Consulting. Franson will continue at Faegre BD until mid-May, when the firm will form an alliance with YourEncore to provide consulting services to life sciences clients. Prior to joining FaegreBD, Franson worked at Eli Lilly and Co. for more than 20 years, where he served as vice president of global regulatory affairs and patient safety, and led Lilly’s U.S. clinical research and trials organization.
Rhonda Deluise, a registered nurse, has been appointed director of quality and support services at Franciscan Visiting Nurse Service, where she has been a manager the past five years. Before joining Franciscan VNS, Deluise was vice president of patient care services for Howard Regional Health System in Kokomo. Deluise received her associate and bachelor degrees in nursing from Indiana University.
Pfizer Inc., Eli Lilly and Co. and Novartis AG have dug an idea out of the pharmaceutical dustbin to create new medicines that are showing blockbuster potential.
“Troll” is a term without clear definition and yet it’s being used to push Congress and the Supreme Court to curb abusive litigation. Companies including Eli Lilly warn against damaging a centuries-old system designed to promote advances in science and industry.
Advisers to the Food and Drug Administration voted 13-1 and 14-0 that the drug, Afrezza, should be approved for Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes, respectively. The FDA doesn’t have to follow the panel’s recommendation.
A federal court has upheld the patent that protects Eli Lilly and Co.'s lung-cancer treatment from generic competition until 2022.
FAST BioMedical has been awarded a $1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to conduct a clinical trial of the diagnostic tool it is developing to measure plasma volume and kidney function in hospitalized patients. The grant, part of the federal Small Business Innovation Research program, adds to more than $16 million FAST has raised. The Indianapolis-based company said in January that it wants to raise as much as $25 million in the next two years to bring its product to market. “We believe that a quantitative measurement of a patient’s plasma and blood volume status and kidney function will have a demonstrable impact on outcomes in an area of medicine that has seen only modest advances in previous decades,” Dr. Bruce Molitoris, FAST’s medical director, said in a prepared statement. “Currently, physicians don’t have either a direct or timely way to assess these key parameters clinically.”
West Lafayette-based Endocyte Inc. could fetch a takeover bid at one of the industry’s highest premiums on record, according to Bloomberg News. Endocyte’s drug vintafolide has proved effective against both ovarian and lung cancers during clinical trials, raising the prospects for the company’s entire technology for developing targeted drugs for cancer and inflammatory diseases. Endocyte may command about $50 per share in a sale, up from its closing price of $21.96 on Friday, according to the average of four estimates compiled by Bloomberg. The estimates ranged from $35 per share to $65 per share. That would be the second-highest takeover premium on record among similar U.S. deals in the industry. According to a report by the Royal Bank of Canada, that could spark a takeover bid from Merck & Co. Inc., which has already paid for vintafolide’s late-stage development and will sell it as an ovarian cancer treatment in Europe. But Endocyte retains rights to the underlying technology and other drugs developed from it. AstraZeneca plc or Roche Holding AG also could be interested, according to a report from Cowen Group Inc. If vintafolide is approved for ovarian and lung cancer in the U.S. and Europe, it could bring in as much as $2 billion in revenue, according to Edward Tenthoff, a New York-based analyst at Piper Jaffray Cos. Endocyte is now developing another cancer drug that targets cells in the same way as vintafolide, though with a potentially more potent chemotherapy drug. “If you have other ones that might be better, that might be problematic for Merck,” said Robert Hazlett, a pharmaceutical analyst at Roth Capital Partners LLC. “It may need to seriously consider Endocyte.”
Indianapolis-based Dow AgroSciences LLC is likely to become a stand-alone public company in the next three years, according to some Wall Street analysts—if in a year or two Dow Agro’s profits are on course to double from current levels. Of course, the parent company of Dow Agro, Michigan-based Dow Chemical Co., could sell Indianapolis-based Dow Agro to another agricultural company, as it tried to do back in 2009. Analysts said Dow Chemical didn’t like the offers it received at the time, which was in the darkest days of the global recession. One reason for selling Dow Agro to another company is that its fast-growing seed business has yet to achieve the scale needed to support the massive R&D investments Dow has made in that area in recent years. Dow Agro’s $7 billion in annual revenue would rank it as the fifth-largest public company in Indiana, behind only WellPoint Inc., Eli Lilly and Co., Cummins Inc. and Steel Dynamics Inc. The company has annual cash flow of about $1 billion, and thinks a raft of new products can double those profits in five to seven years. Dow Agro employs about 1,800 people here, and its most recent hiring expansion touted annual wages from $65,000 to $95,000.
Afrezza, a powdered insulin used through an inhaler, would be the MannKind Corp.’s first marketed product. The treatment would compete against Lilly’s Humalog. An FDA report tied the drug to a decline in lung function.
Dow AgroSciences LLC is likely to become a stand-alone public company in the next three years, according to some Wall Street analysts—if the wunderkind division of Dow Chemical Co. lives up to sky-high expectations.
Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly and Co. discovers, develops, manufactures and sells pharmaceutical products for humans and animals. The company reported 2013 net income of $4.7 billion, or $4.32 per diluted share, on revenue of $23.1 billion.
A larger stock award boosted cash and stock payments to John Lechleiter, CEO of Eli Lilly and Co. in 2013, but overall compensation fell for the top executives of the Indianapolis-based drugmaker. Lechleiter was paid $11.22 million in salary, bonus, stock and perks, according to Lilly’s proxy statement filed Monday morning. That represented a 10-percent increase over his take of cash and stock in 2012. A rise in the value of Lechleiter’s pension boosted his 2012 total compensation more than $4.4 million, but his pension value remained flat in 2013 because Lilly raised the discount rate it used to calculate the present value of its pension liabilities. As a result, when pension values are included, Lechleiter’s total compensation actually fell 23 percent last year compared with the previous year. Smaller increases in pension values also depressed overall compensation of three other top executives at Lilly, ranging from as little as 1.5 percent for Jan Lundberg, president of Lilly Research Laboratories, to as much as 25 percent for Derica Rice, Lilly’s chief financial officer. When those actuarial fluctuations are excluded, compensation for those other executives remained flat from 2012 to 2013.
The stock price of West Lafayette-based Endocyte Inc. skyrocketed 92 percent Friday after the drug company got a thumbs up in Europe to market its first drug and received a new round of favorable clinical trial results. The drug, vintafolide, received a positive opinion from the Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use of the European Medicines Agency to treat a small group of ovarian cancer patients who have tried other treatments. Assuming that opinion is followed by the European Commission, Endocyte and its partner Merck & Co. Inc. would begin selling the drug and its companion imaging agent later this year. The drug, which will be sold by Merck, has received the brand name of Vynfinit while the imaging agent will have the brand Folcepri, and will be sold by Endocyte. Also, West Lafayette-based Endocyte announced that vintafolide proved effective at treating non-small cell lung cancer in a Phase 2 trial. Patients receiving vintafolide and traditional chemotherapy agents had a 25-percent reduction in the risk of death or of their cancer worsening, compared with patients receiving only chemotherapy. The dual announcements, both released before the markets opened Friday, ignited investor interest. Endocyte’s shares closed at $28.17 on Friday, up from $14.64 the previous day.
A new master of public health program at the University of Indianapolis beginning this fall will prepare professionals to identify health disparities and develop community-based approaches to close the gaps. The two-year program will be conducted primarily online, and will ramp up to enroll more than 30 students. It will be the only one in Indiana focused on health disparities, which are the preventable differences in health among populations that can occur along lines of age, sex, ethnicity, geography and socioeconomic status. UIndy expects to develop other concentrations within the master of public health program as part of a broader expansion of its health sciences facilities, faculty and programs.
A European Medicines Agency panel recommended approval of a Type 2 diabetes drug from Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH and Eli Lilly and Co. that was delayed this month by U.S. regulators due to manufacturing deficiencies. The drug, empagliflozin, is expected to bring Indianapolis-based Lilly $519 million in annual revenue by 2019, according to an average of five analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg News. Empagliflozin would be sold under the brand name Jardiance, according to the European Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use, whose recommendation must still be OK’d by the European Commission. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said this month it wouldn’t approve the drug until Boehringer fixes problems disclosed in May after a 2012 inspection of a plant at the company’s headquarters in Ingelheim am Rhein, Germany.
Lilly CEO John Lechleiter was paid $11.2 million in salary, bonus, stock and perks last year, according to Lilly’s proxy statement filed Monday morning. That represented a 10-percent increase over his take in 2012.
Indianapolis-based Lilly is expected to garner $518 million in annual sales from Jardiance by 2019, according to the average of five analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg.
Former Eli Lilly and Co. Nick LeRoy will lead the state board, which reviews, approves and regulates some of the state’s charter schools.
Education. Work-force development. Quality child care. The war on poverty. Crime. Economics. These are all familiar words and phrases used readily by policymakers, business leaders and child advocates. But rarely have the concepts been more tightly intertwined into good state policy than they were during this session of the General Assembly.
Scientists have discovered that a gene-regulating protein that protects the developing brain of a fetus resurfaces in old age and may stave off dementia, a finding that could open a new path in Alzheimer’s research.
Now that Mayor Greg Ballard is lobbying to build a criminal justice complex on part of the property—a use not included in any of five initial proposals—one hopeful development team believes it’s time for the public to see what it envisions for the site.
