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.
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.
Shares of Endocyte Inc. more than doubled in value Monday morning after the company unveiled an up to $1 billion deal with Merck & Co. Inc. to bring an ovarian cancer drug to market. West Lafayette-based Endocyte’s stock had fallen 60 percent in the past 12 months. New Jersey-based Merck will pay Endocyte $120 million upfront with as much as $880 million in future payments possible based on regulatory approvals and sales of the drug EC145, also known as vitafolide. The agreement gives Merck worldwide commercial rights to EC145, in exchange for double-digit royalty payments to Endocyte. The two companies will split sales revenue and marketing costs in the United States. Endocyte already has begun studying EC145 as a potential lung cancer treatment, and intends to study it in still more applications. Merck also gained the rights to the drug for those other types of cancer. Chris Raymond, an analyst at Robert W. Baird & Co., called the agreement “an amazing deal” for Endocyte.
Shareholders of Eli Lilly and Co. failed once gain to remove the drugmaker’s tough poison-pill provision against unwanted buyers. The proposal garnered 62.4 percent of the shares voted at Monday’s annual meeting of shareholders, according to preliminary voting results. To pass, the proposal needed support from the owners of 80 percent of Lilly’s shares. That means Lilly’s corporate bylaws still contain an 80-percent approval threshold for hostile takeover bids, even though the company’s board has recommended removing the policy in each of the past three years. The proposal that failed Monday would have required just a bare majority of shareholder votes to approve key moves commonly used in hostile takeovers. In the past two years, the same proposal received 74 percent and 73 percent of all shares, respectively. The supermajority vote requirement dates from the 1980s, the heyday of “corporate raiders” making unsolicited bids to buy public companies. Lilly’s board, which has been fiercely independent during multiple waves of consolidation in the pharmaceutical industry, finally began to support removing the high threshold in 2010. That decision followed three straight years in which a majority of Lilly shareholders expressed support for removing the supermajority voting requirements.
Roche Diagnostics Corp.’s North American sales rose 7 percent in the first quarter, to 615 million Swiss francs, or about $670 million in U.S. dollars, assuming constant exchange rates across the world. The Swiss company’s North American headquarters is in Indianapolis, along with a significant diabetes manufacturing operation. Diabetes sales in North America shrank in the quarter 5 percent, to 119 million Swiss francs, or $130 million. Roche’s sales of lab and testing equipment, and the equipment and chemicals that go with it, all saw double-digit growth in the quarter. Worldwide, Roche’s diagnostic sales grew 4 percent, in constant currencies, to $2.4 billion Swiss francs, or $2.6 billion.
Bloomington-based medical-device maker Cook Group acquired General BioTechnology LLC, an Indianapolis biotech company with about 20 employees. Terms of the deal were not announced. Cook will rename the company Cook General BioTechnology LLC. General BioTechnology was founded in 1997 by former Indiana University School of Medicine researchers. It operates an umbilical-cord blood and tissue bank for families called The Genesis Bank and a reproductive tissue bank called Genome Resources.
Biomet Inc.’s sales rose 5 percent in the three months ended Feb. 29, to nearly $709 million, compared with the same period a year ago. The growth was driven by increased volumes in North America and the Pacific Rim. The Warsaw-based orthopedic-implant maker’s financial results are always closely watched as an early signal for the rest of the industry, which will report first-quarter results later this month. Biomet’s sales of knee implants rose 4 percent and sales of its hip implants rose 6 percent, compared with the same quarter last year. The company’s operating income rose 14 percent, to $108.1 million, primarily due to lower amortization expenses recorded from the company’s 2007 buyout by private equity firms. Biomet has a whopping $5.3 billion in debt, which required interest payments in the quarter of $117 million. That expense and tax payments led Biomet to a loss for the quarter of $16.5 million, up from $11.6 million a year ago.
The proposal garnered support from the owners of 62 percent of Eli Lilly’s outstanding shares. To pass, the proposal needed approval from the owners of 80 percent of Lilly’s shares.
Eli Lilly and Co., facing generic competition to two of its top drugs, needs to rely on new medicines rather than cost-cutting to overcome the revenue loss, CEO John Lechleiter said Thursday in Boston at the annual meeting of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.
Imagine high school graduates from the Eli Lilly or the Cook Pharma Charter School of Chemistry.
Eli Lilly and Co.’s newest drug is a boon for Alzheimer’s research but is likely to bring the Indianapolis drugmaker less than $100 million in annual sales—at least initially, according to one of the few analysts to make a forecast.
The agent, called Amyvid, is not expected to produce high-dollar sales for Lilly, but it could help to identify patients with Alzheimer’s—and those without it—earlier, perhaps improving treatment and focusing research efforts.
Bureau of Labor Statistics revises numbers, but region is still 30,000 jobs short of pre-recession peak.
The $1.9 billion sale of the city’s water and sewer utilities was a profit gusher last year for buyer Citizens Energy Group—at least on paper. Dwarfing the returns of its gas, thermal and other divisions, the newly renamed Citizens Water turned a profit of $53.4 million.
