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Our colleagues over at the Deal Journal raise an interesting point this afternoon: Even as there’s been a recent flurry of deals in the the U.S. bio-pharma world, a handful of European biotech shops have been sitting unsold on the auction block.
Nycomed, of Switzerland, looked into being sold earlier this year, but that didn’t [...]

Drug companies are supposed to sell their drugs to Medicaid for the cheapest price they negotiate with purchasers from the private sector. Sometimes they get in trouble and have to pay a lot of money if they fail to do that.
The Justice Department said yesterday that the federal government and 16 states are joining two [...]

More pharma corporate governance action: Abbott shareholders voted down a proposal calling for a non-binding vote on executive compensation. The company had opposed the measure; the owners of 40% of the company’s shares voted in favor, Dow Jones Newswires reports.
Just yesterday, Pfizer shareholders passed a “say on pay” resolution (52% in favor) and J&J shareholders [...]

Both Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson held their annual meetings today, which makes for an interesting study in contrasts.
Pfizer shareholders voted to give themselves an “advisory vote” on executive compensation, while J&J shareholders voted down a similar proposal, notes Pete Loftus of Dow Jones Newswires. Both votes were close: 52% in favor at Pfizer, versus [...]

Forget slow growth for U.S. prescription drug sales. This year, sales are likely to fall by 1% to 2%, according the drug data firm IMS health. It would be the first time that’s happened in more than 50 years, Dow Jones Newswires notes.
The reasons are familiar: the recession, combined with more health costs being shifted [...]

If you’ve spent a day at the Motor Vehicles Department fruitlessly waiting to get new license plates, then you have an idea of what it can be like for pharma sales reps during a chunk of their time. New figures indicate drug reps don’t get in the door to see a doctor on 13% of [...]

Add one more pharma exec to those bemoaning the state of industry R&D.
“Seventy-five cents of every dollar we spend on R&D goes to fund failure,” Merck chief strategy officer Merv Turner said at a conference yesterday, the journal Science reports on its ScienceInsider blog.
As we noted last week, the whole industry seems to be [...]

In the byzantine world of paying for health care, there’s a big difference between a prescription drug you pick up at the pharmacy, and a prescription drug you get via injection at the doctor’s office.
For patients on both Medicare and private insurance, the drug you get at the doctor’s office is typically covered under the [...]

New York City’s health department has been sending reps to “detail” doctors — drug-industry speak for the face-to-face chats that drug sales reps have long had with doctors about the supposed benefits of the latest drugs. But in the case of the city health department, the chats are about issues such as how to spot [...]

Just a few days after Johns Hopkins announced a stricter conflict-of-interest policy for its doctors, some big-name Massachusetts hospitals are moving in a similar direction.
Doctors at Partners HealthCare, a system that includes Harvard-affiliated Mass General and Brigham and Women’s hospitals as well as outpatient clinics, will be barred from accepting free meals from drug makers. [...]