Pharma companies – the big R&D spenders

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…

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,…

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…

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…