Posts Tagged ‘m&a’


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  • Medical Marijuana: Putting Together California’s Research

    Thursday, February 18th, 2010 at 05:00 | Comments Off

    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.

    Of course, lots of state residents have found their own, much more varied, answers, since California’s law is one of the most open-ended about ..read more

  • Selling a Health Business in the Developing World? Call Abbott

    Thursday, January 28th, 2010 at 05:32 | Comments Off

    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:

    I wouldn’t tell you we’re ..read more

  • GSK CEO on Big Deals: ‘Paying a Premium … to Fire People’

    Friday, January 22nd, 2010 at 04:40 | Comments Off

    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.

    He didn’t focus on the pipeline drugs or growing franchises that acquirers often cite. Instead, he waded into the ramifications of making a big acquisition at a moment when many ..read more

  • Now Pfizer & Teva Are (Reportedly) Bidding Against Each Other

    Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 at 02:12 | Comments Off

    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.)

    Both would-be buyers are emblematic of the shifting landscape. Pfizer, the world’s biggest pharma company, is facing the expiration of the patent on Lipitor, the biggest selling drug of ..read more

  • A Little Bit More On the Job Cuts at Merck & Pfizer

    Friday, January 8th, 2010 at 09:32 | Comments Off

    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.

    Both companies have said they’ll cut thousands of jobs as part of the big mergers both completed last year, and these announcements account for a small fraction of those — 500 cuts for Merck, starting on Feb. 9, and 400 for Pfizer, starting on Jan. 31, according to the posting. Still, it seemed worth ..read more

  • Novartis-Alcon: Not Really a Consumer-Health Deal

    Tuesday, January 5th, 2010 at 01:52 | Comments Off

    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.

    Given Alcon’s prominent place in the contact lens aisle of your neighborhood pharmacy, it’s tempting to label this deal as a drug-maker’s bid to get into the consumer-health business — like Sanofi-Aventis’s recent (much smaller) agreement to buy ..read more

  • Merck and J&J Land Deals; Biogen Idec, Not So Much

    Friday, December 18th, 2009 at 04:18 | Comments Off

    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.

    “We are moving on,” Biogen spokeswoman ..read more

  • Medicare at 55: Widespread Approval for a Phantom Program

    Friday, December 18th, 2009 at 03:13 | Comments Off

    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).

    But one health-care proposal did score very well in the poll: Getting rid of the public option, and allowing people between 55 and 64 to buy into Medicare. Fifty-eight percent of ..read more

  • Eli Lilly Isn’t Planning to Buy Its Way Around the Patent Cliff

    Saturday, December 12th, 2009 at 02:02 | Comments Off

    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.

    But Lilly emphasized at its annual analyst day yesterday that it didn’t plan to ..read more

  • Should Docs’ Prescribing Habits Be for Sale?

    Saturday, December 12th, 2009 at 00:51 | Comments Off

    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.

    The amendment, backed by Democratic Sens. Herb Kohl and Dick Durbin, would ban the sale of doctors’ prescribing records “for marketing purposes,” the Associated Press reports. (We’d link straight to the amendment, but it doesn’t look ..read more