A U.S. appeals court Wednesday said a lower court was correct to invalidate a patent on the medicine that expires in 2013.
Gemzar generated $1.36 billion in global sales in 2009.
The gains amid economic malaise are impressive, but also unsustainable. Companies can’t continue to grow earnings forever based on cost-cutting.
Venture dollars for Hoosier companies are still few, but the flow of deals is picking up.
Copenhagen-based health-care company Ascendis Pharma A/S received offers of about $400 million, an unidentified source said.
Ascendis may choose a final bidder by early September.
With Eli Lilly, Roche Diagnostics and other large life sciences companies shedding jobs, Indiana needs small
life sciences startups to fill the void. To help such companies, two former Lilly employees are starting an institutional
review board that will help small companies launch clinical trials of their innovative technologies. Pearl IRB,
based in Indianapolis, is run by Lilly alumnae Diana Caldwell and Gretchen Miller Bowker. It is, according to the Indiana
Health Industry Forum, the first commercial institutional review board in the state. That’s significant because such
boards must approve clinical trials before such research on humans can begin. Typically, universities and large hospitals
have institutional review boards, but they are not normally available for researchers not affiliated in some way with those
institutions.
Iraq war veteran Nate Richardson is now using his battlefield experience to launch his own business. His company, Anderson-based
Coeus Technology, developed an antimicrobial liquid it says can be added to military uniforms and equipment
to make them resistant to germs for longer periods of time than current products. The U.S. Army Material Command is currently
testing Coeus’ MonoFoil Technology for its use. But Coeus is also pursuing sales of MonoFoil to civilian users, such
as hospitals and schools. Coeus opened a year ago in Anderson’s Flagship Enterprise Center. It plans to add packing,
filling and research facilities in the next two years, creating 30 to 50 jobs by 2012.
A team of researchers at Purdue University say they’ve found a new marker for prostate cancer that
could replace the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) that is now the leading indicator for the disease. Purdue chemist Graham
Cooks and Purdue oncologist Timothy Ratliff led the team, which found that the compound cholesterol sulfate occurs in prostate
cancer tumors but not in healthy prostate tissue. That stark difference could prove better than PSA, which sometimes appears
at elevated levels in prostates that are inflamed or enlarged, but not cancerous.
The California-based Howard Hughes Medical Institute has awarded $364,000 to more than double Indiana University’s
repository of fruit flies, which have served as the basis of most genetic research for the past century. The Bloomington Drosophila
Stock Center houses 30,000 fruit fly strains and helps develop scientific tools that are used to design new fly strains. The
new grant will allow the stock center to expand to as many as 70,000 fruit fly variants. When the stock center moved from
the California Institute of Technology to Indiana University 25 year ago, it was home to only 1,675 strains.
Indianapolis-based Dow AgroSciences posted a profit of $196 million, up from $140 million in the same quarter
last year, according to Bloomberg News. Second-quarter revenue increased 4 percent, to $1.3 billion, for the unit of Michigan-based
Dow Chemical Co. Company officials credited increased sales for Dow AgroSciences’ herbicides, including some new products,
in spite of weather-related delays.
Eli Lilly and Co.’s loss of a patent on one of its blockbuster drugs in court late last month received a collective yawn
from
investors, who have shunned the stock because of five looming patent expirations.
To create a disciplined investment strategy, I developed “The Ten Essential Principles of Entrepreneurship You Didn’t
Learn in School.” Over the course of 10 columns, I will feature each of
these essential principles. This is the third installment.
An experimental medicine for hepatitis C that Lilly helped identify and develop is now on the cusp of market approval, with
analysts predicting as much as $2 billion in annual U.S. sales.
WellPoint Inc.’s now infamous decision to raise rates on individual customers in California as much as 39 percent was apparently made over objections by the company’s California president. Those increases by the Indianapolis-based health insurer were widely blamed for reigniting a dying health reform bill that WellPoint opposed. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Leslie Margolin said she worked internally to prevent WellPoint from raising rates so high and, once they did, to scale them back. The newspaper reported that Margolin and others voicing concerns about the size and timing of the hikes were overruled by WellPoint corporate executives. Margolin did not voice concerns about the increases when she was called before the California legislature to explain them, but the Times said she did apologize in a speech at Pepperdine University. WellPoint replaced Margolin last month and she told the Times she was escorted from her office by security guards, without a chance to say farewell to her employees. WellPoint said Margolin’s departure had nothing to with the rate hikes.
Officials in Gov. Mitch Daniels’ administration want to use the Healthy Indiana Plan as the vehicle to expand Medicaid coverage under the new federal health reform law—in spite of Daniels’ earlier comments that the new law would kill the three-year-old plan. According to the Associated Press, Indiana human services chief Anne Murphy sent a letter to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services saying the Healthy Indiana Plan is "the natural vehicle" for expanding Medicaid coverage to Indiana residents in 2014. But when the new health law passed, Daniels described the Healthy Indiana Plan as a "program whose days are numbered" and asked Murphy to begin planning its phaseout.
Northwest Radiology Network PC recently expanded into Anderson by acquiring Madison County Imaging at St. John’s Medical Center and affiliating with Central Indiana Orthopedics of Anderson. Northwest Radiology is now providing its services to St. Vincent Heart Center of Indiana. Both St. John’s and the Heart Center are owned by the St. Vincent Health hospital system, based in Indianapolis.
The complex regulatory process for winning approval of combo medical products is the topic of next week’s Life Sciences Lunch at the Barnes & Thornburg law firm downtown. Gretchen Bowker, an Eli Lilly and Co. alumna and now chief operating officer of Pearl IRB Inc. in Indianapolis, will present, as will Julie Dykstra, a Barnes & Thornburg attorney. The Aug. 17 event, organized by the Indiana Health Industry Forum, costs $10 and starts at 11:30 a.m.
Leaders tackle issues ranging from research to cold storage to the future of Eli Lilly and Co.
Many people in our community, state, country and around the globe need our help. The numbers are staggering.
Indianapolis-based drugmaker Eli Lilly and Co. faces such an unprecedented string of patent expirations and an unheard-of
loss of revenue that it’s hard to picture what the company will look like in five years.
Eli Lilly and Co. on Thursday lowered its revenue outlook for the year after it lost a patent lawsuit over its attention
deficit hyperactivity drug Strattera. The patent had been set to expire in May 2017. Lilly plans to appeal.
Studies showed that the treatment did not slow the disease's progression. It's just the latest setback for the pharmaceutical
giant, which lost a patent lawsuit over a major drug last week and faces an unprecedented number of patent expirations through
2014.
Approval for the millions of Americans with chronic back or knee pain may add more than $500 million, or 16 percent, to Cymbalta’s
annual sales.
A dozen potential products designed to slow or stop clumps of protein from forming in the brain, a condition linked to the
disease since 1906, have failed in mid- to late-stage testing since 2003.
The invalidation of Lilly’s Strattera patent opened the door for as many as 10 companies to sell generic versions of the drug,
which generated U.S. sales of $445.6 million last year as a treatment for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Outside advisers to the Food and Drug Administration voted 8-6 Thursday in favor of a broader use of Cymbalta on the basis
of studies in lower back pain and osteoarthritis of the knee.
Two former Eli Lilly and Co. employees launched the firm that promises to attract more clinical trial business to the state.
Indiana’s unemployment rate increased by a sliver, to 10.2 percent, in July despite increases in jobs in many industries.
