Pharma companies – the big R&D spenders

Natural products have an interesting story. The story of Taxol or Paclitaxel is interesting from its discovery as a natural product extracted from the bark tree to use as a cancer therapeutic. This compound came out of a screening effort in 1962 and it took until 2001 to become the highest selling cancer therapeutic. Now,…

Pharmaceutical companies are thought has rich giants with many resources available to them. However, they optimize manufacturing costs for small molecule chemical entities by outsourcing parts of the manufacturing, forming alliances with chemistry suppliers or basing their operations in low cost countries, like Puerto Rico. This works well for chemistry but for biological entity manufacturing,…

Drug Discovery is expensive and many pharmaceutical companies make sure that the process is followed through all the steps including the ability to get their investment back from drug discovery. Janssen just got the FDA approval for tuberculosis. However, their motive was very different. There are only few hundred patients with drug resistant TB (tuberculosis)…

Medicinal chemists have been using fluorine as a Hydrogen substitute in drug discovery for a long time. It has been used in drug discovery to the extent that nearly 25% of the drugs today including some of the block busters have fluorine in them; like Prozac, Lipitor and Pervacid. Why do chemists use it? As…

Nearly 100 cancer physicians had published a report in Blood that the prices of drugs for cancer that typically cost about $100,000 per year are unsustainable and something needs to be done to manage that for the patients. The article is worth a read and compares a UK study which typically puts as a life…