| Charles River CEO Defends WuXi PharmaTech Purchase ChinaBio Today submits: Charles River Laboratories (NYSE: CRL) defended its $1.6 billion purchase of much-smaller WuXi PharmaTech (NYSE: WX) Monday, even though the transaction will bring only incremental profit growth in the near term. According to CEO James C. Foster, WuXi gives Charles River a major foothold in China, a significant market for CRO services. Plus, the purchase takes Charles River into a new business sector: early-stage drug discovery. Foster’s comments were carried in a Boston Globe article that gave background to the purchase in Charles River’s home base of Boston (see story).Complete Story » seekingalpha.com |
FDA Questions Safety of 'Female Viagra' The Food and Drug Administration questioned the effectiveness of a proposed drug for treating low-sex drive in women and raised concerns about how safe the pill would be if used widely. online.wsj.com |
MannKind / Seaside 88: Not Good News for Investors Derek Lowe submits: Readers may remember Generex (GNBT), the company that's developing a buccal insulin spray. I'm not sold on their technology or their prospects, to put it mildly. In this post I took a look at the investment outfit that did a stock transaction with the company, and found them not to my taste, either.Complete Story » seekingalpha.com |
Investment Opportunities in AML Frontline Therapies Michael Becker submits:Acute myelogenous leukemia [AML] is a fast-growing cancer of the blood and bone marrow. Unformed cells called myeloblasts, or “blasts,” reside in the bone marrow and normally become a particular kind of cell - a white blood cell, red blood cell, or platelet. In AML, abnormal blasts produce white blood cells that do not function properly. They do not fight infections and, as they build up, they inhibit the production of normal white blood cells, red blood cells, and platelets that the body needs.Standard frontline therapy for AML patients under the age of 60 consists of cytarabine [AraC] combined with an anthracycline [such as daunorubicin or idarubicin] in what is commonly referred to as the 7+3 regimen. While 45% of elderly patients with AML [70+ years old] achieved a complete response [CR] using this regimen, there was no improvement in overall survival and more than a third of patients died within the first eight weeks of treatment according to a recent study published in the journal Blood[i]. This is consistent with the CR rates of 40%–60% with conventional chemotherapy and disease-free survival of less than 20% at three years referenced in the literature[ii].Complete Story » seekingalpha.com |
PPD and VirtualScopics Establish Strategic Alliance for Medical Imaging Services [Business Wire] - PPD, Inc. and VirtualScopics, Inc. today announced a strategic alliance to deliver a comprehensive set of clinical and medical imaging services that will enable biopharmaceutical companies to make faster, more confident decisions on the development of their oncology compounds, creating time and cost efficiencies. us.rd.yahoo.com |