Author: PharmaTimes

Sir Tom McKillop, chief executive of AstraZeneca, has threatened to move some of the company’s operations from the US to Asia if the issue of drug reimportation in the US market is not resolved, according to a report in UK newspaper, The Daily Telegraph.

The champagne will have been flowing over the weekend at Eli Lilly after a US federal judge upheld the validity of the firm’s patents on Zyprexa (olanzapine), its anti-schizophrenia agent [[15/04/05a]], but this morning, the company’s strategists will be looking to see what can be done to halt the decline in sales of the drug.

Memory Pharmaceuticals’ share price closed down more than 37% on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange on Friday after Swiss partner, Roche, said it had decided not to pursue the further development of two PDE4 inhibitors for psychiatric and neurological indications.

The US Food and Drug Administration has hit both Pfizer and Bayer with warning letters, saying that advertisements for the respective drugs – the allergy medicine, Zyrtec (cetirizine), and the erectile dysfunction offering, Levitra (vardenafil) – are misleading.

German’s Bayer is eyeing a 13% increase in drug sales for its Japanese unit over the coming five years, according to a Bloomberg report, which should be spurred on by the launch of the thrombosis drug, BAY59-7939.