Veterinary Portfolio......

Sometime back news was that Merck is planning to disinvest its animal healthcare which it had acquired from Schering- plough corporation deal last year and today Pfizer announced that it is planning to disinvest its animal health assets to Boehringer Ingelheim, these assets it acquired after Wyeth acquisition last year. With this deal Boehringer will be acquiring manufacturing facilities in in US and Canada. The deal includes acquisition of IP related to Wyeth Fort Dodge Animal Health portfolio which includes cattle and small animal vaccines with other some animal health pharmaceuticals. Till now two of the big giants have considered dis investing part of their veterinary product line, what’s next in this segment?

Healthcare-Movers & Shakers

Fierce biotech has recently published report about movers and shakers of health care sector; these include blogger, doctors, business professionals and politician who represent the present and future of health care in United States

David Brailer, MD, PhD- Chairman, Health Evolution Partners

Mark Chassin-President of The Joint Commission

Dan Drawbaugh- Chief Information Officer at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center

Atul Gawande-Surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital; staff writer for New Yorker magazine

Karen Ignagni-President and CEO of America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP)

Paul Levy-President and CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center

David Rosenman, MD-Director of the Mayo Clinic's innovation curriculum

Rick Scott-Entrepreneur; former hospital executive

Kathleen Sebelius-Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services; former governor of Kansas

For more insight please click into the following link
http://www.fiercehealthcare.com/special-reports/9-people-watch healthcare?utm_medium=nl&utm_source=internal

Latest Deals :)

During this recession there has been series of Merger, acquisition and licensing happening in the field of cancer therapy not only in United states, Europe but also in countries like North Korea who are making their presence felt in the global market, companies like PharmAbcine are into monoclonal antibody production and have in recent past raised money worth $6 Million for their research, At the other end there are some companies such as Anthera which are going for IPO worth $70 Million.....the recent trend which has been observed is that companies are going for cost effective M&A and licensing deals and there is no severe recession in number of deal activity in pharma..What is your say?

European commission.....

YEAR-2007-June 1: European commission came up with new European Community Regulation on chemicals and their safe use (EC 1907/2006) called REACH which stands for Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemical substances. According to these regulation Manufacturers and importers for chemicals are required to collect information on the properties of their chemical substances, for safe handling, and thus companies register their chemical safety information in a central database run by the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) in Helsinki..................

YEAR-2009-Sep 15: European commission collaborates with European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations for promotion of new drug development. The funding is part of Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) which was formed in year 2007; the total IMI budget for the period 2008-2017 is around €2 billion. The first proposal for IMI was drafted on April 2008. Out of 134 proposals which were submitted to IMI last year, 15 papers were selected to receive a total of €246 million. Hope to have Commissions like this in India soon !

India born CMO targeting Uncle Sam ...............

In a span of 10 years this company has made its place as a leading CMO organization (Contract Manufacturing Outsourcing) from India. Dishman has already established itself as a preferred contract manufacturing partner by various pharmaceutical companies around the globe. Dishman, Ahmadabad based is one company to look for, In the beginning of year 2007 Dishman went on to acquire Swiss company which was into developing drug conjugates and their further production and then Solvay’s business unit thus establishing itself in European map and this year it has established its china operations and is in verge of starting its Japanese office and now it has decided to target Uncle Sam….. Good going for an Indian CMO...

Scandinavia & Netherlands........

For the past some years I have observed that lot of new biotechnology companies have been spinning of every year from universities in Scandinavia and Netherlands. Some of these companies are into life sciences instrumentation, few into specialized formulations such as nanotechnology and major companies are into Recombinant protein production from different strains and then their further down stream purification ......Now for past 2-3 years the trend has been that lot of these incubator and specialised companies are been acquired or rather they go into licensing deals or mile stone payment options with the big daddies such as Pfizer, Novartis, GSK, Roche and Astra's...... GSK is a good example for a company which has rather decreased its investment on Research and development and has shifted its focus on investing in strategic alliances and acquisition of these biopharmaceutical companies in Scandinavia.

French Pharma into lot Government contracts!!!!!

Sanofi Aventis which sometime back acquired Santha Biotech in India recently got contract United nations agency for pentavalent vaccine , the contract is worth $350 Million for year 2010-2012 and on the other end Sanofi Pasteur, the French drug makers anti-infective division, has signed an agreement with Brazil’s Butantan Institute to develop 15 million doses of A(H1N1) vaccine for Brazil government and it will also be able to supply additional 15 million doses of vaccine shipment with World Health Organisation (WHO) guidance.

Made in India H1N1 Vaccine ..........

After H1N1 strain had hit the Indian shore some months back many Indian companies started working on development and production of Made in India vaccine for H1N1. The companies which are active in H1N1 vaccine development include Cadila pharmaceuticals, Serum Institute, Bharat Biotech and Panacea Biotech. Sometime back some of these companies also assured Government of India that the vaccine will be ready to hit market by September 2009 and will be safe and effective for the common man. What I think is that we the common mass should work together in hand in hand with these companies and our government to bring the vaccine from research lab to market as soon as possible :)

Global Pharma ..........Next Decade

Today morning was reading an article which said that there will be more demand for biological or rather biopharmaceutical compared to synthetic API in the coming decade. What I feel that there will be rise in the consumption of biological more in developed nations with respect to developing, emerging countries and third world nations and the big daddies will be acquiring many big generic giants in the emerging markets so that they can produce API's in cheaper rates. It is assumed that generic drug's market size is going to increase 8% annually.

After taking over automobiles.......Next target for Japanese companies .......Global Mergers in Pharma

Last year some reports stated that Japanese companies were the most aggressive player in global merger and acquisitions. In these many years we have seen that Japanese pharma companies have gone for global acquisition which include Takede acquiring Millenium, Eisai taking over MGI pharma, Hisamitsu Pharmaceuticals went into acquire Noven pharmaceutical, Diachii Sankyo acquiring one of the world's largest generic drug maker Ranbaxy in India. Some time back in mid July this year the news was that one more Japanese firm was there to bid for Solvey in Europe and Today at 6:30 AM EST- Sep 3, 2009 news stand main headline all over the world was that Dannipon Sumitomo which some time back started its North American operation has decided to buy out Sepracor for $2.6 billion. With this deal Danippon will be able expand its portfolio in global CNS segment. But the truth is United States is still considerd highest source of revenue for both European and Asian companies.

Federal Government New Stimulus...............

After health care stimulus package of $ 14 billion which was distributed through NIH to academics and research institutes all over United States, Today one more Stimulus fund worth $40 Million was allocated for Hospitals across United States in helping them fight Healthcare-Associates Infection (HAI’s) including MRSA, this fund will be distributed by Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. The money will be used to establish or expand state and local efforts to reduce HAIs; with increase in use of disease surveillance systems that will help the local health workers to track HAIs, thereby leading to more hiring and training of public health workers who can promote HAI prevention efforts thus creating more job opportunities in state level. I hope we in India can implement something like this very soon :)

Obama Stimulus funding??????????????????

After Obama became the president of United states, his administration declared that they are going to provide stimulus funding worth $14 Billion for research in life sciences................Many institutes all over United states would have had applied but how many did really got benefited or in the process of getting the stimulus package..........Did the fund money reached the target audience who needed the most to accelerate their research?

Recession.........2009

From the beginning of 2009 there have been many major Merger and Acquisitions not only in pharmaceutical but also biopharmaceutical industry, the reason being the major shift of global market to fill their pipelines with different kind of Monoclonal antibodies for cancer therapy and biological for treatment of different kind of viral diseases..........The major players in this segment are GSK, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Gilead, Baxter, AstraZeneca to name a few.........We have many more major Mergers which are going to happen by Q1 of 2010.