Orshe

India has become a hot market for multinational drug companies since it revised its patent laws to give more protection to brand-name medicine. But to hear the branded makers tell it, the patent welcome mat has some holes in it, a WSJ report recounts this morning.

What kind of company gets a drug through the FDA? If you’re a Japanese company, it seems to help if your main business isn’t prescription pharmaceuticals.

Perusing the list of FDA new drug approvals from Washington Analysis, we found four that originated in the labs of Japanese companies. A new drug for gout came from Teijin, a major textile maker. (Teijin licensed U.S. rights to Takeda.)

Sanofi-Aventis continued the winnowing of its U.S. sales force by telling employees today that another 750 sales jobs are being cut.

Like most of big pharma, Sanofi is facing stiff generic competition in the U.S. Some of its biggest sellers, from sleeping pill Ambien to the cancer drug Eloxatin, have gone generic, and one of the biggest is yet to come: the blood-thinner Plavix is set to lose patent protection in the U.S. in 2011.

There’s more buzz this morning about private equity’s interest in health care. This time, the reported target is Siemens’s hearing aid business.

Sure, hearing aids may not sound like a sexy, go-go business. But apparently they’re the sort of solid money-maker that private capital likes these days — the unit could fetch up to 3 billion Euros ($4.5 billion or so), according to reports from Bloomberg and Reuters.

We have known Merck sold its half of an animal-health venture to partner Sanofi-Aventis partly to avoid antitrust concerns arising from Merck’s pending takeover of Schering-Plough. The problem: Schering-Plough is bringing its own leading animal-health business to the Merck deal, and combining the two would create a juggernaut, with more than a quarter of the world market.

For a clue to where GlaxoSmithKline is cutting back on sales reps, and where the company is staffing up, take a look at the company’s third-quarter earnings announcement, out this morning: Sales were up 25% in emerging markets and 19% in Japan — and down 8% in the U.S.

In the shorthand of the drug business, biotech is sexy and vaccines are boring. But both fields, broadly considered, are “biologicals” — products created with living organisms, as opposed to the mere chemicals that make up traditional drugs.

Socialized health care in the U.K. isn’t so bad, write two U.K. academics in a piece published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

In fact, the authors say the British system has two major strengths that the U.S. can learn from: strong primary care and NICE, the agency that assesses and approves reimbursement for cost-effective treatments.

How can patients accurately assess the risks and benefits when doctors prescribe major medical treatments? It turns out the the odds of getting a serious side effect or winding up in the hospital can vary significantly depending on whether the length of time on a therapy is taken into account, according to the WSJ.

One more Japanese drugmaker is making a big buy overseas: Dainippon Sumitomo Pharma said it’s planning to pay $2.6 billion for Massachusetts-based Sepracor, which sells the sleeping pill Lunesta.