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.

China is to improve quality of pharmaceutical products after a number of deaths from low-grade medicaments. The new standard, which takes effect Jan. 1, will tighten rules that currently let a producer obtain a license if three defects are found but corrected, the Xinhua News Agency said.

Logicalis Awarded 5-Year Contract With Biotechnology Company, Avecia Biologics

Corning Incorporated (NYSE:GLW) announced that Daiichi-Sankyo Co. Ltd. purchased the Corning® Epic® System for installation and integration into drug discovery operations at its Kasai Research & Development Center in Tokyo. Daiichi-Sankyo is a global pharmaceutical innovator and Japan's second-largest drug maker.

Embracing e-clinical with a resource efficient management tool for clinical trials.

Scientists are reporting an advance toward turning corn plants into natural factories for producing gelatin to replace animal-sourced gelatin widely used by the pharmaceutical industry for manufacturing capsules and tablets.