Category: Pharmaceutical

  • Pharma companies – the big R&D spenders

    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.

  • Which Pharma company stock to buy?

    This question can be analyzed an-infinitum but the real answer is simple. Each of the Pharma companies here grows by their ability to research new drugs and chemical compounds. The more they spend on research, the better they will perform moving forward. The chart below is a percentage of what these companies spend on R&D…

  • Pharmaceutical company sales

    It is surprising how few pharmaceutical companies are left that are big companies with large R&D Budgets, but the top 50 Pharma companies has very few surprises from the usual suspects. Take a look at the chart below that is derived from the Pharma Exec (link below) data. Interesting conclusions can be drawn from the…

  • Strange old tales that may have a basis in medicine:

    There are several things that were considered odd by western medicine but have been proven much later to be useful. Consider these two examples: Stitches during surgery: In Kenya, Uganda and parts of South Africa, doctors or sham-doctors used ants to treat a wound. This was considered odd by western medicine. However, what is interesting…

  • Spectroscopy in Pharma companies

    Unlike all other modes of spectroscopy that are used in Pharma companies – for example measurement of protein or DNA the most predominant one is Raman Spectroscopy. The one technique that has been used predominantly in the Pharmaceutical companies is Raman spectroscopy. This is a relatively simple technique that is used to identify the specific…

  • Capitalism and the cost of drugs

    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…

  • Phenotypic drug discovery – Sirturo – Tuberculosis compound from Janssen

    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)…

  • Coating of Pharmaceutical ingredients

    When Pharmaceutical company discover new molecules that are going to become a drug, there is an obvious step where they manufacture the API – Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient, but beyond that, they also need to make sure that the drug is packaged right as a tablet or capsule, is bio-available and there is a big branch…

  • Outlook for Pharmaceuticals for 2013 – Tufts

    Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development does research on drug development and publishes regular reports on drug development. The reports are primarily research conducting by the Center on the current trends in drug development, meetings, forums, courses and discussions. They do not come up with novel methods for drug development but rather act…

  • Pharmaceutical targets: Why target validation does not work?

    Take an example of failed target validation. Eli Lilly is just one company but this could be true of almost all the pharmaceutical companies. Eli Lilly announced in August 2012, that they have stopped “ongoing clinical studies investigating pomaglumetad methionil, also known as mGlu2/3, for the treatment of patients suffering from schizophrenia” in Phase 3.…