| This week's sponsor is FierceBiotech Executive Breakfast at BIO 2018. | | | |
| Welcome to FierceLifeSci Weekly Digest, your roundup of the biggest and most popular stories from each of our publications. | |
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Featured Story | | | Wednesday, May 9, 2018 After a scandal erupted Tuesday when Stormy Daniels' lawyer claimed Novartis made "suspicious financial transactions" to President Donald Trump's personal lawyer, the drugmaker offered up its own version of events. Novartis admitted its payments totaled $1.2 million—$100,000 a month—to Michael Cohen for consulting, even though it determined after one meeting that Cohen couldn't offer any help. |
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| This week's sponsor is Biotech Primer. | | | |
Top Stories Of The Week Monday, May 7, 2018 A new type of drug for depression has been a long time coming, and Johnson & Johnson is looking increasingly likely to end the drought with esketamine—even though one of its late-stage trials missed the mark. Tuesday, May 8, 2018 Shire and Takeda have finally, officially, agreed on a deal. The Japanese drugmaker will shell out $62 billion on the rare disease specialist, almost half of that in cash. Now, it'll be up to Takeda to make the buyout pay, and it's eyeing $1.4 billion in cost cuts—including some 3,600 jobs—to help do that. Wednesday, May 9, 2018 Genentech signed up for a broad, open-ended drug discovery collaboration with Lodo Therapeutics that could be worth nearly $1 billion, focused on deriving unique, natural products from the microbial DNA found in soil. Monday, May 7, 2018 Portola has finally overcome FDA concerns to win approval of its coagulation factor Xa, a bleeding antidote for some of the new generation blood thinners like Xarelto and Eliquis. Portola will launch Andexxa next month, although initial supplies will be limited by a manufacturing changeover required by the FDA. Monday, May 7, 2018 Even though CRISPR offers the promise of cutting out disease-causing genes, it can also make unintentional edits to healthy DNA. A new gene-editing tool is designed to act more like the search-and-replace function in word processing, precisely cutting out genetic variants, then helping DNA repair itself to lessen off-target effects. Wednesday, May 9, 2018 For the first time, DRG Digital’s Manhattan Research queried doctors about which pharma companies they trust in its annual Taking the Pulse survey. They asked a range of questions about those that have quality content, empathy for healthcare providers and a patients-first motivation. However, credible scientific content and nonpromotional value adds from pharma showed the strongest correlation to trust. Monday, May 7, 2018 On Pfizer’s first-quarter earnings call, CEO Ian Read drew up a long list of R&D programs the company’s expecting to drive future growth. But when Bernstein analyst Tim Anderson asked him to narrow it down, Read mentioned vaccines first. Friday, May 4, 2018 Hologic’s move into medical aesthetics isn’t going according to plan. The diagnostics player bought its way into the sector with the $1.6 billion takeover of Cynosure in March 2016 but was forced to write down the value of the acquired business by $732 million this week. Wednesday, May 9, 2018 Pfizer plans to expand its work with Chinese tech startup XtalPi to develop an AI-powered platform to model small-molecule drugs as part of its discovery and development efforts. Resources Sponsored by: Veeva Systems Learn how cloud-enabled solutions provide real-time insights and actionable analytics to improve clinical trial safety and performance in this short presentation. Sponsored by: Veeva Systems Find out how to eliminate regulatory’s tracking spreadsheets for good. Sponsored by: Veeva Systems UCB took a more holistic approach to managing regulatory processes. Read how their efforts are paying off. Sponsored by: Veeva Systems Learn how to reduce change management burden, keep systems current, and maintain compliance by applying a risk-based approach to change management of GxP systems. Sponsored by: Veeva Systems Learn how leading companies, from the world’s top pharma to emerging biotechs, are empowering their medical affairs teams. Sponsored by: Veeva Systems To deliver value to key opinion leaders, medical affairs needs to tailor their engagement with deeper analytics and insights. Sponsored by: Veeva Systems Explore a new model for events management, and learn how to deliver more value. Sponsored by: DocuSign Life science companies are experiencing a significant transformation in how they bring new products to market. |
