Pharmaceutical

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,…

FDA just accepted an IND from Voyageur therapeutics for Parkinson’s disease. This trial essentially adds a gene for an enzyme that Aromatic L Amino acid Decarboxylase (AADC) that catalyzes the conversion of levodopa to dopamine. This is added to the putamen (brain) and adds the adeno associated virus that would carry the gene. It is…

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…

An interesting concept is that typically enzymes have been thought of as proteins that have catalytic properties. However, it would be very useful to have catalyst that is not damaged by heat, pH or other proteins that  affect a typical protein. A science that is evolving is to create these novel materials that are different…

Fortune highlighted Regeneron for its ability to do drug discovery for much less. To quote from their article here are the costs for drug development by some of the Big Pharma: Merck : $5.5 Billion per drug Pfizer: $7.8 Billion Sanofi: $10 Billion Average for other Pharma: $4.3 Billion Regeneron: $0.75 Billion There may be…

Drug Discovery is obviously expensive but the scientists that actually make the discoveries, make very little money. Yes, they might get a bonus or two but it is nowhere close to what the Vice President of the President of the division will make, who get a decent compensation package with stock options and other bonuses….

    Drug Discovery is expensive. Even drugs for an important disease like cancer have not been as easy to discover. There are many reasons and that could be a topic for a separate article but an MIT professor, Andrew Lo has proposed a new model. In the present model, all drug discoveries are funded…

Every company needs marketing and sales. Some it may be generated by the discussion by customers themselves but on the other hand, companies spend substantial amount of money for marketing and sales. However, marketing as its practiced is changing – the digital marketing is taking over more of the dollars as compared to the traditional…

The southeast countries and members of South Eastern Nations (ASEAN: Brunei, Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand) have been working on unifying their health care systems as reported in Pharmaceutical technology in June 2013 with the link to the full article below.   There are several interesting points to note in…

Another look at the financial data of Pharmaceutical companies. Who has the big bucks to spend on research? A picture is worth a thousand words.