Orshe

After California became the first state to allow medical use of marijuana, legislators decided in 1999 to fund research that was supposed figure out what the drug was good for therapeutically. Now we have an answer: a report issued today says it seems to ease some types of pain, and maybe muscle spasticity from multiple sclerosis.

On Abbott’s earnings call today, an analyst asked CEO Miles White about the company’s short-term M&A strategy. “Is your plate full?” the analyst asked, according to a transcript from Thomson Reuters.

The company cut a deal last fall to buy Solvay’s vaccines business for about $7 billion. That followed a January deal to buy Advanced Medical Optics, an eye-care company, for more than $1 billion.

But there are still some deals that would interest the company, White said:

GlaxoSmithKline CEO Andrew Witty swung by Health Blog HQ this week. Given all the M&A action in the industry in the past year (Pfizer-Wyeth & Merck-Schering Plough, to name a few biggies), we asked him about GSK’s acquisition strategy.

“We’re not in the market for traditional, large-scale, premium acquisitions,” he said.

We’ve been writing for a while now about the narrowing gap between generics companies and big pharma.

The latest sign comes from the German business paper Handelsblatt, which reports that Pfizer and Teva are the key final bidders for Ratiopharm, the German generics shop. (Here’s Reuters’s English report on the Handelsblatt story.)

A post today over at Pharmalot drew our attention to notices of job cuts that Merck and Pfizer had announced on a New Jersey government Web site.

Novartis said today that it’s looking to buy out the balance of Alcon, the big eye-care company. Novartis already has a 25% stake, and if the deal goes through as announced, Novartis will have invested about $50 billion to acquire all of Alcon.

You want deals? We’ve got a couple, plus one that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen.

The dead deal is Biogen Idec’s $420 million bid for Facet Biotech; Facet which said this morning that Biogen’s hostile tender offer for the company had failed to attract a majority of Facet shares. Facet had opposed the deal, claiming Biogen was trying to underpay for the full rights to daclizumab, a multiple-sclerosis treatment in development by the companies.

The public isn’t that into the health-care overhaul: In the latest WSJ/NBC poll, 44% of people say it would be better to keep the current system in place, and 41% say it would be better to pass the pending health-care legislation (the difference is within the poll’s margin of error).

Eli Lilly knows a thing or two about the patent cliff: Between now and 2013, patent protection will expire on drugs that account for more than half of its current revenue, this morning’s WSJ notes. Plenty of big pharma players face this kind of problem, and many companies have looked to buy their way out of trouble — witness this year’s big Pfizer-Wyeth and Merck-Schering Plough deals.

Selling information about which doctors prescribe which drugs is big business; IMS Health, one of the big players in the field, just got bought for $4 billion. But a proposed amendment to the Senate health-care bill could take a big bite out of the market.