It was her first port of call and it was steeped in symbolism.

At 7:30 am in Mumbai on July 18, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s private, cosy tete-a-tete with 10 of India Inc’s most sought-after billionaires, was a power breakfast the likes of which the city’s corporate czars had not seen in a long time. The meeting was anything but cozy, with participants hungry to take in every morsel. Read more »

It’s all over the pharma blogs. Generic drug manufacturer Mylan (Pittsburg, PA) and FDA almost had a showdown.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported on July 26 that workers at Mylan’s Morgantown, West Virginia, plants were “routinely overriding computer-generated warnings about potential problems with the medications they were producing.” Workers in all three shifts of the plant’s operations were allegedly involved.  Read more »

As if I needed another reason to believe diamonds can make a person feel better: Researchers at Northwestern University are using carbon-based nanodiamonds to slowly deliver and release tightly bound insulin (acting as a growth hormone to generate new skin cells) to a specific location to fight infection and heal wounds such as those from severe burns. Researchers also showed the insulin was virtually inactive while it was bound to the nanodiamonds, thereby preventing excess drug release. Read more »

Reading the news sometimes gives me a disorienting sense of déjà vu. I know I wrote that last week, but it’s true again for a different reason. Today, French heavyweight sanofi aventis (Paris) announced that it was acquiring a majority stake in Shantha Biotechnics (Hyderabad, India). This new development follows a now-familiar pattern. Read more »

A new report released by OpSec Security, a provider of anticounterfeiting and brand protection services, found an increased amount of illicit behavior in sales of bulk pharmaceuticals and prescription drugs over the Internet. Read more »

One of the International Criminal Police Organization’s (Interpol) six priority crime research areas is drugs and criminal organizations. As reported in the New York Times on July 20, the organization is working with an informal group of researchers and government officials in Africa, Asia, and the US to track counterfeit drugs that claim to treat malaria, a disease that takes nearly 1 million lives a year. Read more »

To no one’s surprise, Wyeth shareholders approved yesterday the $68-billion merger agreement with Pfizer. The vote was overwhelming: 98% in favor. The final step is the approval by the Federal Trade Commission and international regulators. The mega deal, one in three this year (Merck and Schering Plough; and Roche and Genentech) emphasizes the bottom-line industry mantra: diversify to compete. Read more »

Reading the news sometimes gives me a disorienting sense of déjà vu. I felt it again when I read that Ranbaxy (Gurgaon, Haryana, India) had recalled a batch of its acne drug isotretinoin after the US Food and Drug Administration found that the product’s dissolution-test results were out of specification. Didn’t this happen once before? Read more »

The shift in stem-cell policy by the Obama administration and ensuing federal guidelines for human stem-cell research is creating renewed interest in the potential of regenerative medicine as a therapeutic option. As a case in point, the advocacy group, the Alliance for Regenerative Medicine, was formed earlier this month to promote regulatory, research, and reimbursement policies that will foster innovation in regenerative medicine. The alliance, which includes universities, life-science companies, and healthcare investors, will also serve as a source of information about regenerative medicine for policymakers, the media, and the general public. As the bioethics of certain types of regenerative medicines are debated and its scientific potential evaluated, a bottom-line question arises. Can regenerative medicine generate sufficient financial returns to make it a viable option for the pharmaceutical industry? Read more »

A new report from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), says that West Africa has “increasingly become the target of a range of counterfeit medications, including antibiotics, antiretroviral drugs and medicines to fight malaria and tuberculosis.”

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