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Pfizer exec Martin Mackay is decamping for cross-Atlantic rival AstraZeneca, where he’ll be president of R&D, a new position, Dow Jones Newswires reports.

Mackay held the same title at Pfizer from 2007 to 2009, but in the wake of the company’s Wyeth acquisition, he split the top job …

View original post here: London Calling: Pfizer’s Mackay to Head R&D at AstraZeneca

The company held its annual meeting at the Bank of America Auditorium in Boston, but told a Dow Jones Newswires reporter that media weren’t allowed to attend.

Here is the original post:  Boston Scientific to News Media: No Annual Meeting for You!

Abbott is the latest drug maker to reduce its outlook because of health-care overhaul elements such as immediate increases in Medicaid discounts. Here’s the Dow Jones Newswires story.

As earnings season continues, we’ll track what pharma companies are saying about the near-term impact of legislation on its sales and earnings. Yesterday Johnson & Johnson predicted the industry as a whole would lose about $4 billion in 2010 sales and $11 billion in 2011 sales due to the new law.

It turns out those computer games that are supposed to increase cognitive skills through short-term memory, problem-solving, and visual-spatial skills exercises actually do something: They improve users’ prowess in short-term memory, problem-solving and visual-spatial skills exercises.

The FDA today disclosed several warning letters it had sent to drug makers and weight-loss spas for “false” and-or “misleading” claims for their products. Here’s a rundown:

A few items of interest involving the FDA:

Congress last year added the tobacco industry to the FDA’s regulatory mix and today a panel of health experts making up the agency’s new Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee is kicking off a two-day meeting. First on the agenda: how menthol flavoring in cigarettes affects smokers’ habits.

Fallout from Genzyme’s production problems at its Allston, Mass., plant continue to bedevil the company, which announced it faces a slew of enforcements actions by the FDA.

Agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration have been pushing harder to investigate cases of nursing-home staff giving powerful medications to patients without a doctor’s prescription. But if that sounds all well and good, some say it’s just the nub of a more-complicated situation.

Amid all the ink going to what the proposed health-care overhaul would do, we wanted to note an easy-to-overlook provision that it won’t do: eliminate many so-called pay-for-delay deals.

Those are the oft-criticized pacts under which branded drug makers give something to generic makers stall cheaper copycat versions coming on the market. The deals, which usually involve settlements of patent disputes between the generic and branded drug makers, result in consumers paying the higher branded prices until the generic counterparts arrive.

The world’s biggest generic drug maker is getting bigger with the announcement this morning that Israel’s Teva Pharmaceutical had won the bidding against Pfizer for Germany’s Ratiopharm Group. The pricetag: $4.97 billlion.

A bidding contest had been dragging on for months for Ratiopharm, the world’s sixth largest generics maker. The deal is the biggest takeover in the generic drugs market since Teva bought U.S.-based Barr Pharmaceuticals for $7.46 billion in 2008.