Finally, some new revenue. Eli Lilly and Co. will enjoy modest new sales later this year after U.S. regulators approved a new diabetes drug developed by a partner company, and another company nears approval on a drug that will produce royalties for the Indianapolis-based drugmaker.
Eli Lilly and Co.’s Amyvid, an experimental imaging agent to detect signs of Alzheimer’s disease in the brain, shouldn’t be approved because of unreliable study results, a consumer-advocacy group said.
The Center for the Performing Arts in Carmel has extended CEO Steven Libman’s contract through 2016, the board of directors announced Wednesday.
The owners of a new microbrewery in Fountain Square, slated to open by mid-August, plan to differentiate the business by focusing on the "convergence of art and science" in brewing.
Is it finally time to get some growth again out of a stock that since its debut on the public market 59 years ago has minted thousands of millionaires?
For 25 years, Venkat Venkatasubramanian, the Reilly professor of chemical engineering at Purdue University, has studied how to keep horrendously complicated, excruciatingly twitchy technological edifices from collapsing under their own weight.
Amylin Pharmaceuticals Inc. said Monday it filed a lawsuit against Eli Lilly and Co., accusing the larger drugmaker of breaking their commercialization deal for diabetes drugs by teaming with the German company Boehringer Ingelheim to develop and sell a competing product.
The justices Monday left intact a federal appeals court decision invalidating a patent that would have protected Gemzar from generic competition in the U.S. until May 2013.
Eli Lilly and Co. is a two-timing lout, according to a lawsuit filed Monday by Amylin Pharmaceuticals Inc., a San Diego-based company with which Lilly has developed and co-marketed Byetta, a successful diabetes drug. Amylin’s lawsuit accuses Indianapolis-based Lilly of breaking terms of their deal by forming a similar development and marketing agreement with Germany-based Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH to sell a drug that will compete with Byetta. The competing drug, called Tradjenta, was approved for sale this month by U.S. regulators. Lilly and Boehringer formed their agreement in January. Amylin said it plans to continue working with Lilly, but it wants to keep Lilly from using the same sales force to sell both Byetta and Tradjenta. Its lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California. Lilly’s top diabetes executive, Enrique Conterno, called Amylin’s suit “without merit.”
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration requested new data or new studies from Zimmer Holdings Inc., DePuy Orthopaedics Inc., Biomet Inc. and many other makers of orthopedic implants to see if metal-on-metal hip implants raise the level of metals in patients’ blood, according to Bloomberg News. Zimmer, DePuy and Biomet are all based in Warsaw. Zimmer spokesman Garry Clark wrote in an e-mail to Bloomberg News that his company was "working to understand the scope of the agency's request."
Ball Memorial Hospital was losing $9 million a year before Indianapolis-based Indiana University Health acquired it in 2009. Two years later, Ball executives say the Muncie hospital has swung to a $6 million gain, according to The Star Press in Muncie. Ball Memorial executives say they reduced costs via an 18-month pay freeze and by taking advantage of IU Health’s greater buying power. “If Ball Memorial is paying $10 a unit but the next day I can pay $7 because of the IU Health relationship, those cost savings are significant,” Ball Memorial chief Michael Haley told the newspaper. He added that the hospital has worked to increase patient referrals by repairing strained relationships with local physicians, many of whom were referring patients to hospitals in Fort Wayne or Indianapolis.
A consumer advocacy group says Eli Lilly and Co.’s Amyvid, an experimental imaging agent to help doctors detect Alzheimer’s disease in patients’ brains, shouldn’t be approved because it could lead to false diagnoses of the disease, according to Bloomberg News. Public Citizen, based in Washington, D.C., voiced its concerns in a letter in the Journal of the American Medical Association, criticizing a 35-person study of Amyvid published in January. Amyvid, which Lilly acquired last year in a $300 million purchase of Avid Radiopharmaceuticals Inc., was recommended in March by a U.S. Food and Drug Administration advisory panel—if Lilly developed a training program to help doctors interpret brain scans in which the agent lights up clusters of amyloid plaques, the telltale sign of Alzheimer’s. Currently, such plaques can only be observed in autopsies of deceased Alzheimer’s patients. But Public Citizen wants Amyvid tested by more doctors in more patients, because it says results so far have been unreliable. Lilly officials called the group’s claims “inaccurate.”
Shareholders of WellPoint Inc. approved on Tuesday the hefty pay packages of the company’s executives and voted for the right to weigh in annually on future executive compensation.
The annual growth rate in spending on drugs may be cut in half over the next five years as people opt for less expensive generic medicines over brand-name treatments, a health-care research group said Wednesday, highlighting the challenge pharmaceutical firms like Eli Lilly and Co. are facing.
In overnight e-mail to supporters, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels cites family considerations as reason he will stay out of race.
Eli Lilly and Co. has agreed to license the U.S. marketing rights of its slow-selling sepsis drug Xigris to a newly created local biotech company called BioCritica that will seek to reinvigorate sales of the medication.
Eli Lilly and Co. named Dr. David M. Kendall, currently chief scientific and medical officer of the American Diabetes Association, as a distinguished medical fellow who will serve as senior medical adviser for Lilly’s diabetes division. He will transition from his current role in late July. Kendall also is an associate professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota and an adjunct medical director at the International Diabetes Center, both located in Minneapolis.
Well, here’s some consolation for the nightmarish year WellPoint Inc. had in 2010: Its legal department was one of three finalists for “Best Legal Department” honors from Corporate Counsel magazine. The Indianapolis-based health insurer lost that competition to Google Inc., with UPS also a finalist. But WellPoint still got this praise from the magazine: “WellPoint’s lawyers had a tumultuous year, having to deal with political reaction to its Anthem Blue Cross subsidiary’s proposed California rate hikes, filed just as health care reform passions began to flare. Even after the Affordable Care Act was signed, the nation’s largest health benefits company continued to take heat from the president on down, while it struggled to interpret and comply with the new law.” Many regarded WellPoint’s headaches as self-inflicted, but that criticism was aimed at its former general counsel and now CEO, Angela Braly, not the current legal team.
Eli Lilly and Co. has agreed to license the U.S. marketing rights of its disappointing sepsis drug Xigris to a newly created biotech company that will seek to reinvigorate it. The new company, BioCritica, will be based in central Indiana and will be jointly owned by Lilly and two private investment firms: New Jersey-based Care Capital LLC and North Carolina-based NovaQuest Capital Management LLC. The company will be led by David Broecker, who managed Lilly manufacturing operations in Germany and Ireland before becoming CEO of Alkermes Inc., a Massachusetts-based drug development firm. Within Lilly, Xigris was well down the priority list to get time from scientists and other staff. In 2010, it generated sales of just $104 million, which was down 18 percent from the previous year. Xigris was the first drug Lilly launched after it lost patent protection on its bestseller Prozac in 2001. Expectations for the drug initially were huge, with some Wall Street analysts predicting annual sales of $2 billion. But the drug struggled after U.S. regulators issued a strong warning about its bleeding side effects and because hospitals struggled to identify which patients and in which situations the drug was appropriate. BioCritica hopes results from a new clinical trial of Xigris will establish clarity on how to use it, thereby reenergizing sales. BioCritica has an option to acquire the international rights to Xigris at a later date, as well as options to acquire other critical-care drugs that are in Lilly’s pipeline. BioCritica also hopes to acquire critical-care drugs from other drugmakers.
Riley Hospital for Children lost its CEO last week, but got a fresh round of positive publicity to help it find a new one. Dan Fink resigned on Friday, according to Indiana University Health, the parent organization for Riley. IU Health said it would launch a national search for a replacement. Meanwhile, Riley was once again ranked as one of the top 50 children’s hospitals in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Riley was nationally ranked in each of the 10 specialties included in the report. Its only top 10 ranking is in urology. The complete rankings can be viewed online here.
A team led by researchers at the Indiana University School of Medicine has identified a potential new way to target the incurable disease of emphysema with drugs. The researchers identified a lung protein in mice that appears to play a role in smoking-related emphysema and have created an antibody that blocks the protein’s activity, according to an article posted on the website of the Journal of Clinical Investigation. The lead author on the study is Matthias Clauss, a research professor of cellular and integrative physiology at the IU med school. Mice exposed to cigarette smoke that received an inhaled version of the antibody had significantly less cell death and inflammation and improved lung function compared to the mice that did not receive the treatment. The benefits to the treated mice continued even after the treatment stopped.
Scientists with Roche Holding AG, the parent company of Indianapolis-based Roche Diagnostics Corp., may have found a way to overcome a blood barrier that keeps drugs from directly entering the brain, potentially opening new pathways to attack Alzheimer’s disease.
Amylin Pharmaceuticals Inc. says a federal court has issued an injunction preventing drug development partner Eli Lilly and Co. from using the same sales force to sell an Amylin-developed diabetes treatment and a competitor's.
We expect IPS to take its students to the very pillars of academic success after thoroughly hog-tying them. It’s difficult to find more breathless insanity than this.
