Even though the potential payoff for health care innovation is less certain these days, the business case for new ways to produce more food has never been stronger. That’s the analysis that lies behind BioCrossroads' new report an agricultural innovation.
The city that brought the world Prozac and other neuroscience drugs is doubling down on brain research with a new $52 million research center near Methodist Hospital.
Pfizer Inc., Johnson & Johnson and Elan Corp. are ending most plans to develop an Alzheimer’s drug after a second trial failure. Eli Lilly is developing a similar treatment.
Dr. Craig Brater, 66, has worked at the Indianapolis-based school for 26 years, including the past 12 as dean. The school is the second largest medical school in the nation and the only one in Indiana.
Eli Lilly and Co. will book about $790 million in pretax income in the third quarter thanks to an early payment from former drug development partner Amylin Pharmaceuticals.
Odds are long that Eli Lilly and Co.’s leading Alzheimer’s drug will show positive results when its Phase 3 trial results are released within a few weeks, but even the smallest improvement in the cognitive impairment of test patients would be a home run for Lilly.
WellPoint Inc. director Lenox Baker said there is no move on the company’s board to oust CEO Angela Braly even after an institutional investor said last week she needs to go. “Angela, I think, has done a great job,” Baker, a retired cardiac surgeon, told Bloomberg News. “Quite frankly, I think some of this stuff with the company is coming from Wall Street. I’m much more looking to the future.” WellPoint, the second-biggest U.S. health insurer, reported earnings last month that missed analyst estimates, said it would lose 900,000 members, and reduced its 2012 forecast. Those announcements prompted Leon Cooperman, whose hedge fund Omega Advisors owns 2.1 million WellPoint shares, to tell Bloomberg: “There’s a universal view that the CEO is the wrong CEO to lead the business.” Since Braly became chairwoman of WellPoint in 2010, the company’s stock price has fallen 8.5 percent. During the same time, Minnesota-based UnitedHealth Group has seen its stock rise 53 percent. The results “put an exclamation point on the differences between United and WellPoint,” Carl McDonald, a Citigroup analyst in New York, wrote in a note to clients. “Time may be running out for WellPoint’s management team.”
Eli Lilly and Co. will receive more than $1.2 billion in early payments from its former drug development partner Amylin Pharmaceuticals Inc. The payments come after Lilly competitor Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. finished its $5 billion acquisition of Amylin. Indianapolis-based Lilly partnered with California-based Amylin to launch the diabetes drugs Byetta and Bydureon. But a dispute arose between the two companies after Lilly launched another diabetes drug, Tradjenta, in partnership with Germany-based Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH. Lilly intends to use the Amylin payments to pay development costs of new drugs it hopes to bring to market.
Dr. Craig Brater will retire in June next year as dean of the Indiana University School of Medicine, he announced Wednesday, and the school has formed a committee to find his replacement. Brater, 66, has worked at the Indianapolis-based school for 26 years, including the past 12 as dean. The school is the second-largest medical school in the nation and the only one in Indiana. Brater oversees a massive operation that includes a main campus in Indianapolis and eight satellite campuses throughout the state. The medical school had a budget of nearly $426 million in the last school year, up 30 percent over the past five years. It employs 1,900 professors who oversee a total student body of 1,880 and also serves doctors at five hospitals in Indianapolis, including Wishard Memorial Hospital, the Roudebush Veterans Affairs Medical Center, and IU Health’s University Hospital and Riley Hospital for Children. Brater is a native of Oak Ridge, Tenn. He attended undergraduate and medical school at Duke University. Before IU, he was part of the faculty at the University of California at San Francisco and worked for the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.
Alph Bingham spent more than 28 years at Eli Lilly and Co. and from there co-founded InnoCentive Inc., a Massachusetts-based organization that organizes crowdsourcing to help companies solve internal challenges. The Carmel resident spoke about the challenges now facing pharmaceutical companies, which are buckling under ever-rising costs to develop drugs with lower rates of success and worsening prospects for reimbursement. Bingham’s solution is for pharma to embrace crowdsourcing and other “open innovation” concepts in order to spread the risk of R&D among more partners.
The Capital Improvement Board wants to plug a $2 million funding hole that will open up next year for the Indianapolis Convention & Visitors Association with the expiration of a $5.9 million grant from the owner of the JW Marriott hotel downtown.
North Carolina-based Quintiles, a contract researcher for drug companies, will lease 12,000 square feet in the Pan Am building for the next five years in a move to get closer to Eli Lilly and Co., one of its major clients. The office, which initially will employ 50 people, is a collaborative project of the two companies, Quintiles spokesman Phil Bridges told the Triangle Business Journal. “The goal of the collaboration has been to develop an integrated approach to optimizing how [human drug] trials are conducted, eliminate costly inefficiencies and use ‘big data’ to drive better drug development decisions,” Bridges said. The office could employ as many as 65 by the end of the year.
Here’s one way to win over skeptical locals in your hometown market: spend $1 million. Indianapolis-based hospital system Indiana University Health, which took that name last year after being called Clarian, will give $1 million to Purdue University to help build a facility that will, in part, house a satellite campus of the IU School of Medicine. IU Health was formed in 1996 by a partnership between the IU medical school and Indianapolis’ Methodist Hospital. IU Health operates one of its hospitals, IU Health Arnett, in the back yard of Purdue’s main campus in West Lafayette. When they made the name change, IU Health executives acknowledged it might present challenges in Lafayette, but they said market research showed the name still was preferred to the vanilla Clarian.
The recent sale of a California-based medical device company sent some money back to Indiana. MindFrame Inc. was acquired for $75 million by Massachusetts-based Covidien Inc. That produced an undisclosed return for Indianapolis-based CHV Capital, the venture capital arm of the Indiana University Health hospital system as well as SV Life Sciences, a Boston-based venture capital firm that has received funds from the $58 million INext Fund raised by Indianapolis-based life sciences development group BioCrossroads. MindFrame develops devices for minimally invasive removal of blood clots from stroke patients. In addition to the cash from Indiana, the company also received technical help from students at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute and some consulting advice from participants in the Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute. “Our relationship with CHV Capital and IU Health became an important element of creating value in the business and was a natural extension of our fund-of-fund relationship with BioCrossroads and INext,” said David Milne, managing director of SV Life Sciences.
San Francisco-based cloud-computing service provider Appirio Inc. said it will spend $2 million to open an office in downtown Indianapolis’ Pan Am building, where it will employ 300 by 2015.
Eli Lilly and Co.’s experimental Alzheimer’s drug failed to meet its primary goals in two separate clinical trials. However, when the results of both trials were combined, the drug appeared to have slowed the decline of cognition in some patients.
The surprise positive effect shown by an experimental Alzheimer’s drug “excited” executives at Eli Lilly and Co., but it raised as many questions as it answered.
Eli Lilly and Co. won a U.S. appeals court ruling that upholds the validity of a patent for the lung-cancer drug Alimta and blocks generic competition through 2017. Alimta generated $2.5 billion in sales last year.
While investors supported the sliver of promise offered when Eli Lilly and Co. said its Alzheimer’s drug may slow progression early in the disease, doctors weren’t as impressed, saying it could take years to find out for sure.
Angry shareholders of WellPoint Inc. are searching out and suggesting replacements for WellPoint CEO Angela Braly, according to analysts interviewed by IBJ and Bloomberg News. Sheryl Skolnick, a health care analyst at CRT Capital Group in Connecticut, and Jason Gurda, a Leerink Swann & Co. analyst in New York, said investors have suggested James G. Carlson, the chief of Amerigroup Corp., as Braly’s replacement. Gurda also said investors have suggested David B. Snow Jr., the former chief of Medco Health Solutions Inc., as a candidate. Indianapolis-based WellPoint is buying Amerigroup, a rival insurer, for $4.9 billion. Medco was recently acquired for $29.1 billion in April by Express Scripts Holding Co., a fellow drug-benefits manager. While neither man has publicly expressed interest in the job, and WellPoint’s board has expressed confidence in Braly, that hasn’t stopped the speculation, Gurda said. Other names raised by investors include Gail Boudreaux, head of the health plan division at UnitedHealth Group Inc., the biggest U.S. medical insurer, and Kenneth Goulet, WellPoint’s executive vice president, said Thomas Carroll, a Stifel Nicolaus & Co. analyst in Baltimore.
Eli Lilly and Co. won a U.S. appeals court ruling that upholds the validity of a patent for the lung-cancer drug Alimta and blocks generic competition through 2017. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on Aug. 24 rejected arguments by Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. that the patent was invalid. It affirmed a lower court ruling. The decision was posted on the court’s website. Alimta, whose chemical name is pemetrexed, generated $2.5 billion in sales last year for Indianapolis-based Lilly, making it the company’s third-biggest-selling drug. Alimta is designed to hamper cancer cells’ ability to use folic acid to grow after an initial treatment with other drugs. Israel-based Teva had argued that Lilly had patented a compound that wasn’t much different from what was covered by two earlier patents. The three-judge panel said the lower court was correct to rule that the 2017 patent is distinct from the earlier inventions.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has identified a southern Indiana farm that produced cantaloupes linked to a deadly salmonella outbreak and says the operation has recalled its melons, according to the Associated Press. Chamberlain Farms of Owensville could be one source of contaminated fruit in the multistate outbreak that has infected 178 people, hospitalized 62 and killed two, the FDA said in an Aug. 22 statement. Attorney John Broadhead said Chamberlain Farms voluntarily withdrew its cantaloupes last week and that all its retail and wholesale purchasers complied with the recall. The farm about 20 miles north of Evansville sold cantaloupes to grocery stores in four southwestern Indiana counties and one in southeastern Illinois, Broadhead said in a prepared statement. The fruit was also sold to wholesale purchasers in St. Louis; Owensboro, Ky.; Peru, Ill.; and Durant, Iowa. Neither the FDA nor the farm gave any information about what might have caused the contamination.
After Eli Lilly and Co. found a “glimmer of hope” in its test of its experimental Alzheimer’s drug, doctors and stock analysts generally concluded the company needs to conduct another long clinical trial to prove the drug’s effect. But one stock analyst thinks Lilly already has what it needs to ask for approval for its drug.
Eli Lilly and Co. halted testing on an experimental treatment for schizophrenia after the company determined the drug was unlikely to show a benefit in patients.
Indianapolis-based drugmaker Eli Lilly and Co. said Thursday its general counsel, Robert Armitage, will retire at the end of the year and be replaced by deputy general counsel Michael Harrington.
