Biotechs Biting the Dust

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On Tuesday, Epix Pharmaceuticals announced that they were dissolving.  And unlike many innovative life sciences companies, they’re not being acquired by another company to take advantage of their research, nor are they evaporating because their one line of research failed in clinical development.  Rather, they’ve just run out of money, can’t raise any more, and their assets are worth less than their debt.  So they’re selling off what they can, and locking the door behind them.

While the company’s announcement isn’t too reveling about their history, looking at their information on Yahoo! Finance shows that while they have consistently lost money, (as do virtually all biotech companies without products to sell), year-over-year, revenue was increasing and the losses were shrinking. …

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Humana Does Drugs

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Humana has put another couple of videos on YouTube in their ongoing series to explain – from their perspective – how the healthcare system works.

The first new video is “Insurance Companies and Prescription Drugs.” Like their other videos, this one paints the insurance industry’s as rosy and altruistic, while stating that “Prescription drug manufacturers are allowed to set their own prices, and they often build large profit margins into name brand drugs to recoup the costs of researching, marketing and advertising.”

This statement strikes me as very curious.  First, how do companies “build large profit margins into name brand drugs?”…

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Importing and Exporting Health Care

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The August 16th Economist had an interesting article (and commentary) about patients traveling to other countries for medical treatments, a.k.a. “medical tourism.”  The article focused on the US healthcare system, and mentioned other parts of healthcare that are being exported, (such as transcription of medical records, reading of imaging studies), and imported, (such as physicians and nurses).  But there are two aspects of this issue that the article didn’t touch upon – chronic care and pharmaceuticals:

Medical Tourism Doesn’t Work for Chronic Care
Patients are traveling from the US to other countries for expensive procedures like heart surgery and joint replacements. …

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Canada’s Proposal for Subsequent Entry Biologics

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After writing about Follow-On Biologics in a recent posting, I saw a notice about Health Canada’s proposal for how they would approve biologic products that are similar to already approved biologics whose patents have expired. They call these products Subsequent Entry Biologics (SEBs), and the proposal is open for public comment from March 14, 2008 until April 16, 2008.

While the draft guidance is lengthy, it does strike an overall well-balanced tone:

  • “SEBs are not ‘generic biologics'”
  • Approval of an SEB does not mean it can automatically be substituted for the original biologic that it is “similar” to
  • Comparative studies will be required to generate data showing similarity to the original biologic in terms of quality, safety and efficacy

In many ways, the draft guidance is similar (no pun intended) to the process the US FDA used to approve some generic drugs prior to the 1984 Hatch-Waxman Drug Price Competition and Patent Term Restoration Act.…

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