This year, five organizations announced or began preparing for the launch of major campaigns. The targets ranged from $12.5 million for Heartland Truly Moving Pictures to $100 million for the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra.
Eli Lilly and Co. and Amylin Pharmaceuticals Inc. said Wednesday they are asking the Food and Drug Administration to expand approval for their type 2 diabetes drug Byetta, which could bolster sales as the companies try to get approval for a new, longer-lasting version of the drug.
A pair of Indianapolis military contractors scored new government deals worth a combined $154.4 million, the Department of Defense announced late Wednesday.
We don’t expect all our holiday wishes for the New Year to come true. We’re not that naïve. But in this season of hope, we’d like to offer these familiar refrains—and end with some proof that dreams do, sometimes, come true.
It’s back to reality for Bioanalytical Systems Inc. After its stock price soared 135 percent in three trading days, the stock started falling back to earth—helped in no small part by the company’s underwhelming earnings report. The West Lafayette-based firm said revenue dipped 13 percent, to $7.4 million, in its fiscal fourth quarter compared to the same period a year ago. Its loss narrowed to $300,000 in the quarter, compared to a loss of $1.4 million in the same period last year. The company sells testing equipment and services to pharmaceutical firms, which have been retrenching the past two years. “The revenue decline in fiscal 2010 stems mainly from study delays, price declines and spending reductions by our customers as part of their overall cost-savings initiatives,” Bioanalytical officials noted in a statement. But the company’s business accelerated in the second half of its fiscal year, causing CEO Anthony Chilton to give an upbeat outlook for 2011.
Eli Lilly and Co. and Amylin Pharmaceuticals Inc. have asked the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to approve their diabetes medicine Byetta for use in combination with basal insulin, which diabetics take in between meals to control their blood sugar. The companies would like to reignite Byetta sales, which have slumped since 2008, when the FDA publicized cases of pancreatitis among patients taking the drug. Indianapolis-based Lilly and San Diego-based Amylin tried to win approval this year for a once-weekly version of Byetta, called Bydureon, but the FDA asked for more tests, delaying the drug’s approval until 2012.
BioCrossroads’ Indiana Seed Fund invested $250,000 in Indianapolis-based Aarden Pharmaceuticals. Aarden’s leading drug program focuses on tuberculosis. The company’s product is based on research by Zhong-Zin Zhang, a professor and chairman of biochemistry and molecular biology at the Indiana University School of Medicine. Zhang is an expert in protein tyrosine phosphates, a group of signaling enzymes that regulate cellular processes. His research was funded through Lilly Endowment’s Indiana Genomics Initiative. The company decided last year to establish its headquarters here, selecting Indianapolis over San Diego.
Clarian Health physicians will now provide cardiac services to patients at Columbus Regional Hospital facilities under a new affiliation. The agreement ensures Columbus Regional has full-time availability of heart surgeons, in additional to the interventional cardiology care provided by Indiana Heart Physicians-Columbus. Columbus Regional has offered 24-7 heart surgery since 2002. In 2011, Clarian will change its name to Indiana University Health.
CNO Financial Group Inc. got a financial strength upgrade from A.M. Best Co., the pre-eminent rating agency for insurance companies. New Jersey-based Best boosted its grade on Carmel-based CNO from B (fair) to B+ (good), crediting CNO with focusing more on business lines where it has a clear competitive advantage and its recent financial restructurings. CNO, which was formerly called Conseco, sells life and health policies to middle-income families.
Warsaw-based Zimmer Holdings Inc. acquired Sodem Diffusion S.A., a Switzerland-based maker of orthopedic surgical power tools. The company will be merged into Zimmer Surgical, a unit based in Dover, Ohio. Zimmer has been trying to diversify its business as sales of its hip and knee implants have stagnated in western markets.
Rolls-Royce Corp.’s Indianapolis operation is finishing the year out the way it started—racking up lucrative military deals.
Marcadia Biotech Inc., a Carmel-based biopharmaceutical company founded by prominent scientists from Eli Lilly and Co. in 2006, has been acquired by Swiss life sciences giant Roche.
Exhibit, grant power audience development initiatives.
Booming growth, rising middle classes are attracting investors.
Wayne Seybold is well-known as an Olympic ice skater. He is also earning a reputation as an innovative two-term mayor of his hometown of Marion. But few Hoosiers are aware of his role as global trade warrior.
Many voters I talked with wanted to send a wakeup call to politicians of both parties that they should heed the words of Jim Carville to then-candidate Bill Clinton in 1992: “It’s the economy, stupid.”
Regulators cleared 21 medicines, the fewest since 2007, for sale last year. It was the first time in a decade that Pfizer Inc., the world’s largest drugmaker, as well as Lilly, Merck & Co. and Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. were shut out at the same time, according to agency records.
Two St. Vincent Health hospitals—Saint John’s Health System and St. Vincent Jennings Hospital—have started using the DOCS4DOCS service provided by the Indiana Health Information Exchange. DOCS4DOCS centralizes in electronic format all the lab results, radiology reports, transcriptions, pathology and hospital admissions reports, discharge and transfer reports from all participating Indiana hospitals, physician practices, labs and radiology centers. The service, which swaps more than 6 million messages each month, is paid for by hospitals and laboratories but provided free of charge to physicians. The exchange, based in Indianapolis, now has more than 80 hospitals and 19,000 physicians participating in its medical-record-sharing services.
Marcadia Biotech Inc., a Carmel-based biopharmaceutical company founded by former Eli Lilly and Co. executives, has been acquired by Swiss life sciences giant Roche. Some details of the transaction will be disclosed in February. Roche’s holdings include Roche Diagnostics, which employs more than 3,000 in Indianapolis at its North American headquarters. Marcadia has about a dozen employees at its 11711 N. Meridian St. headquarters, who have so far been sustained by the millions of dollars Marcadia has raised in venture capital and its partnerships with large drug companies.. Marcadia has been focusing on drugs to treat metabolic diseases such as diabetes and obesity. It previously partnered with drug giant New Jersey-based Merck & Co. Inc. and with Indianapolis-based Lilly. Last June, Marcadia and Lilly struck a deal to develop short-acting glucagon drugs to treat severe hypoglycemia. Roche’s big hope for a new diabetes drug, taspoglutide, had its clinical trials suspended in September due to severe digestive-tract side effects.
The Indianapolis-based drugmaker spent $2.1 million in the three months that ended Sept. 30, a 5-percent increase from the same quarter last year and a jump of more than 30 percent from the $1.6 million it spent in this year's second quarter.
Observers say conditions are ripening for more deals like the recent $525 million sale of Aprimo Inc. in the months ahead—not only among IT firms, but also among biotech companies here.
Outside advisers to the FDA will meet Jan. 12 to review whether the drug should be approved for people with pancreas insufficiency caused by cystic fibrosis, chronic pancreatitis or other conditions.
Amylin Pharmaceuticals Inc., rebuffed twice in its bid for U.S. approval of a weekly diabetes drug, will meet its timetable and submit a heart-safety study to regulators by the end of 2011, its CEO said.
A complex deal with Boehringer Ingelheim also gives the German company rights to two experimental Lilly insulins.
The deal Eli Lilly and Co. announced Tuesday morning with Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH sounded a lot like a baseball trade—with five drugs and payments to be named later—but analysts and investors generally liked what they heard.
Indiana University researchers won a $7 million, four-year grant from the National Institutes of Health’s Human Microbiome Project. Barbara Van Der Pol, an epidemiologist at the IU School of Medicine, and David Nelson, a molecular biologist at IU’s Bloomington campus, have been named co-investigators on IU's portion of the project, which has already been operating under the leadership of Dr. J. Dennis Fortenberry, professor of pediatrics at the IU School of Medicine. The researchers are studying at a microbial level sexually transmitted diseases in Hoosier men, which often lead to pain during urination and sex.
The School of Science at IUPUI won a $943,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to help minority students pursue careers in life sciences research. The money will fund the IUPUI Undergraduate Research Mentoring in the Biological Sciences Program, beginning this spring. Two-year fellowships will pay stipends to selected science students to conduct intensive research on “biosignaling,” the ability of cells to respond to their environments. The students also will attend seminars and presentations designed to help them toward a career in bioresearch. Lastly, the students will be paired with minority mentors who already hold graduate degrees.
Warsaw-based Zimmer Holdings Inc. Chief Executive David Dvorak said that demand for hip- and knee-replacement procedures will recover in the second half of 2011, when consumers have jobs and insurance again. "There will continue to be an impact until unemployment rates are reduced and [insurance] enrollment rates go back up," Dvorak told investors in a presentation at a conference hosted by J.P. Morgan in San Francisco, according to Reuters. "We're going in the right direction, but it's a slow recovery," he said. Sales of orthopedic implants, which Zmmer manufactures, have been especially hard-hit during the recent recession, as patients out of work or short of cash put off elective surgeries.
WellPoint Inc. expects its profit this year to exceed $6.60 a share, the company announced Monday at the J.P. Morgan health care conference in San Francisco. Such a performance would slightly beat the expectations of Wall Street analysts, who currently predict 2011 profit of $6.57 per share for the Indianapolis-based health insurer. Analysts expect the same amount of profit when WellPoint reports its 2010 results on Jan. 26, according to a survey by Thomson Reuters. WellPoint provides health benefits to 33.5 million Americans, more than any other company. But the job losses of the past two years have kept its profits from growing.
An experimental drug being developed by Eli Lilly and Co. doesn’t appear to help with digestion as much as existing drugs, according to a staff report released Monday by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. According to Bloomberg News, Lilly’s drug liprotamase, also known as Solpura, is designed to help patients suffering from poor digestion due to cystic fibrosis, chronic pancreatitis or other conditions. Outside advisers to the FDA are scheduled to meet today in Maryland to review whether the drug should be approved for those patients. The panel of advisers will issue a non-binding recommendation to the FDA, which will make the final decision. Indianapolis-based Lilly got rights to Solpura in July when it purchased Massachusetts-based Alnara Pharmaceuticals Inc. for up to $380 million.
