Treatments for central nervous system diseases have a huge potential payoff, analysts say. A hint of whether the gamble may pay off is due in the second half of this year, as Eli Lilly and Co. and Pfizer Inc. announce results for Alzheimer’s drugs that attack the same protein as Roche’s experimental drug.
Third Street Partners, a marketing firm that hoped to land half a million dollars in corporate sponsorships for the city of Indianapolis, has received a four-year contract extension to bring home red meat.
Officials consider expanding facility that got off to a slow start but began filling up last fall.
A second experimental cholesterol medicine in a once-promising class of drugs meant to replace blockbusters such as Lipitor has failed in testing, casting doubt on whether any of the drugs will ever make it to pharmacies. Eli Lilly is developing a similar drug.
For more than a year, Eli Lilly and Co. has been viewed by investors as a laggard stock with one, slim shot at producing a huge jackpot: its experimental Alzheimer’s drug. But now company leaders are trying to direct investor attention toward the drugmaker’s diabetes portfolio.
A major lender to Arcadia Resources Inc. has moved to foreclose on the struggling Indianapolis-based business, which in turn agreed to cease operations. Arcadia reported the foreclosure agreement with Dallas-based Comerica Bank, which Arcadia owed $11 million, in a May 3 filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The closing represents the probable final fall for the once-promising health care company. Just two years ago, the company announced a huge expansion that it expected would add 930 jobs in Indiana by 2013. In order to satisfy a debt to one of its suppliers, Arcadia completed the sale of its DailyMed pharmacy business in February to a subsidiary of Illinois-based Walgreen Co. for just $2 million. That left Arcadia with its home health care and medical staffing businesses, which were being funded by an $11 million line of credit from Comerica. Arcadia already had drawn on the entire line of credit, which came due on April 30. The company owed about $30 million to three private equity firms that likely will not be repaid. The company had less than $1 million in assets, according to the SEC filing. In the nine months ended Dec. 31, Arcadia had $61.5 million in revenue and posted a loss of $13.5 million.
Eli Lilly and Co., Pfizer Inc. and AstraZeneca plc will contribute two dozen failed compounds to launch a new $20 million program in which government-sponsored scientists will see if the compounds show promise against other diseases than the ones for which they were first tested. If they do, it could help the drugmakers, which will still own the compounds, to bring them to market faster. The academic researchers would share in the profits of any drugs that make it to market. The program, kicked off May 3 by the National Institutes of Health, hopes to add more compounds soon. “It’s an opportunity to get more value out of our molecules,” said Jan Lundberg, president of Lilly Research Laboratories in Indianapolis. “Instead of parking them, we can let the academic community and NIH continue the testing to see if they have a significant benefit that we actually don’t know of today.”
A researcher at the Indiana University School of Medicine got national attention for his study suggesting that Tasers wielded by police can induce fatal heart attacks. Dr. Doulas Zipes, an emeritus professor of cardiology at the IU med school, found that in eight healthy men who became unconscious after being stunned by a Taser, six developed abnormal heart rhythms. All eight of the men, who ranged in age from 16 to 48, lost consciousness after receiving the shock; seven of them died. “This study doesn’t say that we should abandon using Taser devices, but it does show that users should exercise caution, avoid chest shocks and monitor the person after shock to ensure there are no adverse reactions,” Zipes said after his study was published in the journal Circulation. The results of Zipes' study were covered by USA Today, the New York Times and CBS News. A spokesman for Arizona-based Taser International Inc. told USA Today that the small number of cases in Zipes' study are not enough to draw broad conclusions. "There have been 3 million uses of Taser devices worldwide, with this case series reporting eight of concern," said Steve Tuttle, who also noted that Zipes has testified against Taser as an expert witness in legal cases brought against the company. "This article does not support a cause-effect association and fails to accurately evaluate the risks versus the benefits of the thousands of lives saved by police with Taser devices," Tuttle told the newspaper.
Authorities have made arrests in the 2010 theft of about $80 million in Eli Lilly and Co. prescription drugs from a Connecticut warehouse, according to the Associated Press. Two Cuban brothers were arrested in Florida and charged with helping steal the pharmaceuticals, including Lilly’s drugs Prozac and Zyprexa. The thieves broke into the Enfield warehouse of Indianapolis-based pharmaceutical giant Lilly in March 2010 and stole enough pills to fill a tractor-trailer. The drugs were believed to be destined for the black market, perhaps overseas. After cutting a hole in the roof of the industrial park warehouse, they lowered themselves to the floor, disabled the alarms and spent at least an hour loading pallets of antidepressants and other drugs into a vehicle at the loading dock, authorities said. Lilly plans to destroy the medicines once they are no longer needed as evidence.
Indianapolis-based HealthNet Inc. received a $155,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services to renovate its Fountain Square facility to accommodate 1,150 more patient visits each year. HealthNet will use the money to turn a office space and a medical records storage area into three patient exam rooms. The center already handles more than 35,000 patient visits each year. The money is part of a series of grants to community health centers across the country. The funds were made available as part of the 2010 Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act. HealthNet operates 10 community health centers in the Indianapolis area.
Indianapolis-based WellPoint Inc. topped the list of Indiana companies, ranking 45th. Locally, Eli Lilly and Co. and BrightPoint Inc. also made Fortune magazine's latest annual ranking of the 500 largest corporations based on revenue.
Authorities have arrested two Cuban brothers in the 2010 theft of about $80 million in Eli Lilly and Co. prescription drugs from a Connecticut warehouse, a robbery described as one of the biggest pharmaceutical heists in history, the U.S. attorney’s office said Thursday.
More than 20 compounds that Eli Lilly and Co., Pfizer Inc. and AstraZeneca Plc failed to turn into drugs will be tested by U.S.-sponsored scientists in a $20 million program to see if they’ll work against ailments they weren’t aimed at previously.
The market for testosterone-replacement treatments is growing, but health experts say overuse of the drugs can be dangerous.
BioCrossroads Inc. has raised an $8.25 million seed fund in its second attempt to help startup life sciences companies grow to the point where they can attract venture capital or a corporate funder.
A $100 million partnership will instead produce only $15.5 million after the California-based Alfred E. Mann Foundation for Biomedical Engineering requested to end its agreement with the Purdue Research Foundation. In 2007, the Mann Foundation pledged to fund a $100 million endowment to create and support the Alfred Mann Institute at Purdue University to commercialize Purdue technologies through seed-stage funding and business guidance. But now the Mann Foundation’s focus is changing, its president, David Hankin, said in his only publicly stated reason for the change. Since 2008, the Mann Foundation has given Purdue $15.5 million to advance 11 different technologies. The effort has helped launch such companies as QuantIon Technologies Inc., SpeechVive Inc., ImpactGuard and BioRegeneration Technologies LLC. Purdue will continue to operate the Alfred Mann Institute, which has provided a model for commercializing technologies it is now applying throughout the university.
Henry County Hospital in New Castle opened a Cardiovascular Center this month as a joint venture with the Indianapolis-based St. Vincent Heart Center of Indiana. St. Vincent will provide some of the specialist physicians at the new center. The center will focus on diagnosing and rehabilitating heart patients, and will refer complex cases to the St. Vincent Heart Center for treatment.
Indiana University Health announced Tuesday that it will give $75 million in additional funding over the next five years to ramp up research at the Indiana University School of Medicine and launch more clinical trials around the state. The IU medical school will contribute non-cash resources valued at $75 million toward the effort, which will focus on research in cancer, cardiology and neuroscience. The goal is to expand access to cutting-edge clinical trials to IU Health’s 20 hospitals around the state, as well as to attract the next generation of bright minds to do their research and clinical work in Indiana. IU Health already spends $16.5 million a year on research, according to a report issued last year. The new initiative will nearly double that amount. Much of that money goes to the IU medical school, which is a distinct organization from IU Health, but works closely with the hospital system. The IU medical school attracts $280 million in annual research funding from all sources. The new money will flow to roughly 10 projects, which already have been approved by the IU Health and IU medical school’s boards of directors.
RepuCare Inc., a health care staffing firm, said Wednesday it plans to expand its Indianapolis headquarters, creating up to 82 jobs by 2015. RepuCare already has begun hiring additional employees in health care, account management and administration. The company now has about 50 full-time and 50 part-time employees. Founded in 1995, RepuCare provides staffing services to government health plans, hospitals, outpatient clinics and nursing homes, as well as on-site health care services to employers. The company's notable customers include WellPoint Inc., Eli Lilly and Co., Howard County, and the cities of Indianapolis and Kokomo.
Sales and profits were flat in the first quarter at Warsaw-based Zimmer Holdings Inc., the maker of orthopedic implants reported on Thursday. Profit for the quarter totaled $209.6 million, or $1.17 per share, up 0.3 percent from the same period a year ago. Revenue rose 2 percent, to $1.14 billion. Sales grew 10 percent in Zimmer’s Asia-Pacific regions, but increased just 1 percent each in the Americas and Europe. Zimmer expects to earn full-year profits of $4.70 per share to $4.90 per share, a nickel per share less than an earlier forecast, due to the impact of foreign exchange rates.
First-quarter profits tumbled at Eli Lilly and Co. but were better than either analysts or the company expected. That prompted Lilly to boost its full-year profit forecast 5 cents to 10 cents per share. Lilly’s revenue and profit have been falling after it lost patent protection on two blockbuster drugs: the cancer drug Gemzar in late 2010 and the antipsychotic Zyprexa in late 2011. Lilly’s profit in the first quarter totaled $1.01 billion, or 91 cents per share, down from $1.06 billion, or 95 cents per share, in the same quarter a year ago. Wall Street analysts were expecting 78 cents per share in the most recent quarter, according to a Thomson Reuters survey. The decline in profit was actually much larger than it seemed. A year ago, Lilly booked some one-time charges for research deals with other companies and for reductions in personnel. Excluding all such charges in both years, Lilly’s per-share profit would have fallen nearly 26 percent, from $1.24 per share in the first quarter a year ago to 92 cents per share this year. For all of 2012, Lilly now expects per-share profit in a range of $3.15 to $3.30, excluding a penny-per-share charge taken in the first quarter for a one-time restructuring move.
First-quarter profit declined nearly 8 percent at WellPoint Inc., but the health insurer beat analysts’ expectations and raised its full-year profit forecast a nickel per share. The Indianapolis-based company posted earnings of $857 million, or $2.53 per share, down from $927 million, or $2.44 per share in the same period a year ago. The per-share profits increased because WellPoint has reduced its total shares 10 percent through an aggressive buyback program. Excluding investment gains, WellPoint would have earned $2.34 per share. On that basis, Wall Street analysts were expecting $2.27 per share, according to a survey by Thomson Reuters. WellPoint said gains from its senior business improved, as the company recovered from mispricing some of its Medicare Advantage policies last year. But overall membership in its health plans declined in the quarter by 600,000. WellPoint expects that total to drop another 100,000 during the rest of the year.
A Vivus Inc. pill that is supposed to provide erections within 15 minutes, about half the time or less than Eli Lilly and Co.'s Cialis or Pfizer Inc.’s Viagra, has received U.S. regulatory approval.
Indiana Treasurer Richard Mourdock, who is challenging Republican Sen. Richard Lugar in the May 8 primary, held six different energy-related stocks last year, according to his most recent filing with the state.
RepuCare said the additional jobs will support growth in its staffing business as well as its business providing on-site health care to employers.
Lilly’s quarterly sales and profit fell due to lost patent protection on Gemzar and Zyprexa. But sales of antidepressant Cymbalta, blood thinner Effient, animal health products and sales in China grew by 20 percent or more.
Purdue University plans to start construction this summer on two academic buildings in a $79 million project for its newly designated Life and Health Sciences Park, according to the Journal & Courier of Lafayette. The $38 million Lyles-Porter Hall will house health programs, including Purdue's speech and hearing sciences department and the West Lafayette programs of the Indiana University School of Medicine. Purdue also is planning a $25 million Drug Discovery Building that will bring together pharmaceutical researchers from throughout the school. Plans are for the buildings and a new 850-space parking garage to be completed in 2014.
More than 70 workers will lose their jobs at Integra Specialty Hospital in Muncie when it closes in June. Hospital officials notified the Indiana Department of Workforce Development on Thursday that the 32-bed long-term-care facility will shut down on June 17. Renaissance Specialty Hospital of Central Indiana Operations Co. LLC, which operates Integra, did not provide a reason for the closing. The company said it expects that some of the 72 employees will be offered the opportunity to transfer to other long-term-care facilities.
Eli Lilly and Co. could receive up to $100 million from Washington, D.C.,-based Vanda Pharmaceuticals Inc., which licensed an alcohol-dependence drug from the Indianapolis drugmaker last week. The experimental drug, called LY686017, has been shown to reduce alcohol cravings and consumption in alcoholics. If it reaches the market, the drug would compete with Emend, a similar NK-1R antagonist made by New Jersey-based Merck & Co. Inc.
The government-contracting arm of WellPoint Inc. won a renewal of its contract, worth more than $111 million, to support the desktop program used by customer service representatives at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services for the next five years. WellPoint’s National Government Services unit has held the contract since the program’s inception. The program helped Medicare’s call center field 26 million calls last year. NGS, which employs 2,000, also processed 170 million Medicare claims and administered benefits of $75.6 billion from the Medicare Trust Fund in 2011.
An animal rights group wants the federal government to fine a research institute owned by Indiana University Health for what it calls negligence toward animals, according to the Associated Press. The group Stop Animal Exploitation Now says IU Health's Methodist Research Institute had seven violations, including killing one dog and putting another dog in severe pain. According to a March report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a dog was fed before surgery, which violated proper protocol. The dog’s heart stopped, and it died. IU Health officials said in a statement that the use of animals in research has contributed significantly to advancements in health care.
Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels has endorsed presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney after declining for months to publicly support any of the Republican candidates.
In an hour-long defense of Indianapolis Public Schools, Superintendent Eugene White outlined plans to streamline administrative staff, create more choices for parents, direct more resources to the district’s most challenged schools and give more autonomy to its highest performing schools.
