The companies that make your drugs fear price cuts from the Obama administration. Biotech companies already price drugs at very high gross margins, they fear Barack Obama’s health care reform will cut into their profits. Obama supports lowering drug prices as a requirement for making health care coverage affordable to all Americans.

The statement recently issued by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), acknowledging that there may be a link between the use of the pharmaceutical drug Singulair and suicidal thoughts in its users, represents yet another instance of case reports conflicting with clinical trials and causing the FDA to have to step in. The struggle for more, and better, disclosure between the pharmaceutical industry, medical practitioners and patients is a battle of the utmost importance.

Roche Pharmaceutical this morning made a cash offer to pharmaceutical drug maker Genentech to buy the rest of the shares for US$89.00 per share in cash.

While you thought that those Vioxx studies in medical journals were independent, hands-off affairs that may not have been necessarily true. An examination of medical journal articles about Vioxx and court documents from Vioxx lawsuits found that Merck employees or ghostwriters were frequently involved in various articles, but the primary authors were often academics who actually had little to do with the studies or didn’t always disclose financial ties to Merck.

A method of creating selective terminable transgenic rice was reported by the scientists of Zhejiang University in this week’s PLoS ONE. Unintended spreading of transgenic rice by pollen and seed dispersal is a major concern for planting transgenic rice, especially transgenic rice expressing pharmaceutical or industrial proteins.

In a move to bolster its cancer treatment drug supply Pfizer said that it has reached a deal with Serenex to buy the pharmaceutical drug company.

In a modern-day counterpart to Mao Zedong’s program to modernize the Chinese economy, China’s pharmaceutical industry is quietly taking its own Great Leap Forward — as a major force in drug discovery and development, according to an article scheduled for the Feb. 4 issue of Chemical & Engineering News, ACS’ weekly newsmagazine.

AstraZeneca Plc’s 2007 earnings were down 3 percent, the company said.

A new study published in the February 2008 print edition of The FASEB Journal (www.fasebj.org) describes a scientific advance that should reduce the cost and increase the availability of a wide range of drugs.

In the late 1950s, the late Democratic Senator Estes Kefauver, Chairman of the United States Senate's Anti-Trust and Monopoly Subcommittee, put together the first extensive indictment against the business workings of the pharmaceutical industry.

The U.S. Health authorities approved Swiss pharmaceuticals producer Roche Holding AG’s anemia drug Mircera, but the company is still awaiting resolution of a patent case before launching the drug in the United States.

IBM and TAGSYS today unveiled an integrated offering to help pharmaceutical manufacturers rapidly pilot and use RFID technologies for item level serialization in their packaging operations. Serialization is the first step towards compliance with California's drug pedigree regulations and the basis for improved supply chain performance.