The news that Ireland reached an agreement with the European Union and International Monetary Fund for a EUR 85 billion ($110 billion) bailout, which includes EUR 67.5 billion ($88.8 billion) in external assistance and EUR 17.5 billion ($23 billion) from the Irish government raises an important question for the pharmaceutical industry as to how fiscal policy for European Union member states may affect the environment for pharmaceutical manufacturing. Read more »

Thanksgiving provides a valuable opportunity for us to remember the ways in which we are fortunate. But these days, our high rate of unemployment is making many Americans feel like they have fewer blessings to count. A recent survey shows that economic worries also are taking a toll on our health. Read more »

In a move that has both provided a vote of confidence for an emerging market’s manufacturing capabilities and underlined Western pharma’s increasing reliance on lower cost production alternatives, Nycomed’s plan to relocate its entire Pantrazole API production from two plants in Europe to India recently reached fruition with the inauguration of their extended facility at Navi Mumbai. Read more »

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) is expected to release shortly for public consultation guidelines for biosimilars for monoclonal antibodies (mAbs). As the regulatory environment for biosimilar mAbs begins to be debated, how strong is their market potential? Read more »

Ever want to know exactly what your contract service providers are doing on a day-to-day basis in the lab? Ever wonder how your product is moving along in its manufacturing process? A new video monitoring service from Metrics, called “PharmaVision,” can now give you these opportunities. Read more »

At the end of a week that saw several major companies announce job cuts, the pharmaceutical workforce finally got some good news on Friday. Manhattan US District Judge Colleen McMahon said that she expected to approve an agreement between Novartis Pharmaceuticals (Basel) and a class of 6200 women, thus settling a gender-discrimination lawsuit. “It is the rare settlement where economic damages are compensated in full,” the judge said, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal. Read more »

The wait for the release of a new weight-loss drug got longer recently as regulatory decisions were not in favor of fat-fighting treatments. The US Food and Drug Administration decided in October not to approve two anti-obesity treatments, sending complete response letters (CRLs) to the drugs’ sponsors.  Read more »

So, pharma is — arguably — “over the social media hump.” Everyone now “wants to do it”. But how does pharma do it? How can companies successfully use social media to market their messages and their products? That’s the question addressed in Pharm Exec’s new episode of Pharma Faceoff, chaired by Barbara Ryan of Deutsche Bank. Read more »

A recent survey by the management-consulting firm Accenture shows that US consumers seeking medical advice turn to medical websites, social-media sites, online communities, and informational websites in far greater numbers than they turn to the websites of pharmaceutical companies. The survey results underscore an important question for pharmaceutical companies: namely, how to use new media more actively in their own communication while ensuring the overall quality of online information for  pharmaceuticals. Read more »

The PharmTech editorial team is in New Orleans this week for the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists annual meeting and exposition, being held in conjunction with the FIP Pharmaceutical Sciences World Congress. There more than 9000 attendees and 550 exhibitors here at the Morial Convention Center. Read more »