Antibiotics, The Next Generation
Few things are as inexorable as the march of bacterial resistance. When a person or animal is given an antibiotic, it kills enough pathogens to cure the illness. But bacteria that have mutated so they can resist the drug survive. The next time these bacteria cause an infection, the antibiotic is less likely to work. But that is drawing some biotech companies into the antibiotic research.
The War against ‘Viagra’
The US Food and Drug Administration has announced plans to fight counterfeit drugs. The FDA will introduce technology that could show at a glance if drugs are real, such as watermarks or electronic tags. It will also tighten requirements for drug wholesalers so it’s tougher to sneak counterfeits into legitimate supplies.
BIO leader hits proposal for drug price regulation
The Cambridge-based chairman of the nation’s largest biotech organization is strongly opposing any federal controls in drug pricing if a prescription drug component is added to Medicare.
“It’s price controls or innovation; you can’t have both,” said Richard Pops, who recently was elected to head the board of directors of the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO), a Washington-based information and lobbying group. Pops is CEO of Alkermes Inc. in Cambridge.
Biotech industry in survival mode
Restructuring, retrenching and reinventing themselves, Bay Area biotechnology firms are adapting to weather the economic downturn.
“We’ve noticed (biotech companies) will abandon one or two research products and in the process may have discovered something of more use, readjusting their core competency to find something marketable today, rather than long term”
The genetically-modified food fight
Once again, Europe and the U.S. are at loggerheads. This time, they’re fighting over food, not foreign policy. On July 2, the European Parliament passed legislation calling for detailed labeling of genetically modified (GM) food products.
No simple generic answer
Unlike pills and capsules that are brewed from a mixture of chemicals, injectable therapies like hormones and genetically engineered proteins are not covered by the Hatch-Waxman Act, the 1984 law that laid the foundation for the nation’s generic drug industry. That has left brand-name biotech manufacturers with the hope of monopolies well into the future.
Antibacterials: a dying trade
: Despite strong worldwide demand for effective antibacterial products, sustaining growth within this segment will become a challenging task for major pharmaceutical companies. Currently only six marketed drugs have sales of greater than $1 billion and by 2011, 12 out of 29 key products will face patent expiry. A relatively sparse R&D pipeline will do little to replace older products.
Pfizer’s Quest to Stay Ahead of the Pack
The drugmaker has been a stable holding in unstable times. Now, though, it faces big challenges from rivals to its Lipitor and Viagra
Can Your Genomics Work Contribute to Biodefense
Three years ago, Luis Villarreal, a virologist at the University of California, Irvine, came up with the idea of using in vitro gene activation by PCR to study the proteome of a virus in hopes of developing a high-throughput platform for identifying new vaccines.
Villarreal and his collaborators at the university saw infectious disease as their primary target, but after the anthrax attacks in late 2001 they realized that their work might just as easily apply to tackling bioterror agents…