Health Canada v Merck Frosst
Ujjal Dosanjh and Health Canada are taking aim at Merck Frosst, and by extension Merck & Co, for their approach to releasing information about Vioxx after its withdrawal from the market. (
Read more on the Globe & Mail.) Apparently, Health Canada asked Merck Frosst for raw study data so that HC could analyse the data themselves, and they're still waiting to receive that data. I'm surprised - that HC is surprised. Merck is the target of hundreds and thousands of lawsuits over Vioxx and its alleged role in numerous heart attacks and deaths among its users. Does HC really expect a company facing such legal battles to just give up its raw data in a forum that doesn't guarantee the safeguarding of those data from public eyes?
While I applaud Dosanjh's desire to give HC more powers to require pharmaceutical manufacturers to conduct post-marketing trials and co-operate more fully with HC requests, I don't think going after Merck is the way to go. This is a company that has been known throughout its history for its strong ethics and desire to "do no harm". Even in the case of Vioxx, they pulled the drug off the market themselves, and not in response to a request by HC or the FDA. In fact, an FDA advisory panel
recently announced that the FDA should not pull cox-2 drugs off the market and should allow their continued sale with additional warning labels as the only requirement. And this includes Vioxx.
As an aside, the NY Times is trying to
stir up trouble by pointing out that
10 of the 32 panel members had done consulting work or received research funding from Merck and/or Pfizer. Well, duh. Any scientist worth being on this sort of panel has done a lot of work for the pharmaceutical industry, and there aren't that many big pharma companies out there that these two funding top scientists should be a surprise.
This just in:
Merck is surprised at Dosanjh's outburst and is dismayed that is chose to go directly to the media instead of coming to them first. I can't say I blame them. IMHO, Dosanjh appears to be using the public's anger and fear over the cox-2 situation to increase his department's visibility.
Pfizer acquires private company in apoptosis field
Pfizer announced the acquisition of Idun Pharmaceuticals, a privately held company focused on the discovery and development of therapies to control apoptosis. (
Read more on BioSpace.) The majority of their work is around the field of caspase activity, which is class of protases implicated in the controlled death of just about every cell type in the body.
Security acquisitions put MS in conflict of interest
So Microsoft has finally gotten serious about the security of its software. But instead of trying to actually fix its security problems, it has instead decided to buy up companies that sell virus-scanning, anti-spam, and anti-spyware tools, and then sell those products to customers as standalone products. (
Read more.)
Can they be serious? They want to sell us operating system software full of holes, and then turn around and sell us software to try and plug those holes? When they announced a while back that they were (finally) getting around to thinking about security, I thought they meant they would do something about actually fixing the holes in their software. I certainly didn't think that they would set up a situation that gives them incentives to sell OS software with the most holes possible in order to encourage us to keep spending more and more money on separate security software.
The industry has complained in the past about Microsoft's monopolistic behaviours, and its alleged misdeeds in using its insider knowledge of its operating system in order to make it harder for others to produce add-on software that worked properly with their OS'es. This particular case is just screaming out for another anti-trust lawsuit.
Bush people surprised at reaction of world to his plans
Polls taken after Bush's speech in Brussels, in which he called for the world to support his plans to spread democracy to all corners of the world, showed that a majority of people in 8 countries that are considered American allies are skeptical of Bush's plans and mistrustful of the administration in general, especially after the debacle of the Iraq war. (
Read more.)
According to the White House councillor Dan Bartlett, “People get in their mind that spreading freedom means war, and that's not the case."
Perhaps the US should take it upon themselves to find a country to which they can spread freedom without any kind of war and then go do it, before they expect people to believe that they can do it. So far, they've only shown themselves capable of the kind of democracy-building that comes after the complete destruction of a country's military and civilian infrastructures.
The real sixth sense?
Scientists identify an area of the human brain that may be a form of a sixth sense.
Read more.
Internet pharmacies lobby for easing of restrictions
Representatives from the
Canadian International Pharmacy Association - a fancy name for a group of internet pharmacists - are petitioning the government to allow them to recognize and fill prescriptions written by US doctors, instead of requiring co-signing by a Canadian doctor (read more on
CANOE). The main thrust of their argument is to try to refute the fear that cross-border sales will hurt the supply of drugs to Canada. Fair enough - if they believe that it won't happen, let them prove it. So far, the extent of their argument is "it hasn't yet, so why would it in the future?". David Mackay of CIPA said "There is no evidence of shortages of Canadian drugs", citing the current size of the industry at $1 billion.
This argument by CIPA is ridiculously naive. Over the past year, many US jurisdictions have passed or attempted to pass laws allowing their public employees' prescriptions to be bought from Canadian pharmacies. If this trend continues, this $1B industry could easily climb into the tens of billions. Sure, there's no shortage now, and no action has been taken by the pharmaceutical giants yet, but if sales grow tenfold, you can bet that will change very quickly.
Ankur Arora of the BC equivalent of CIPA claims that the pharmaceutical companies are so interested in keeping their longer patent terms, which they were granted in exchange for agreeing to price controls here in Canada, that they wouldn't dare interrupt the supply. Again, deceptive or just naive? The Canadian prescription drug market is barely 2% of the world market, whereas the US makes up 50% of global sales. If the big, mostly US-based, drug companies are faced with the possibility (and likelihood) that their US sales could be cut by even 10% - two and a half times the size of the entire Canadian market - all bets are off. If half of US drugs were supplied by Canadian pharmacists, US sales of drugs would plummet by anywhere from 20% to 40% (using my own very rough math based on prices of brand-name drugs in Canada being 35% to 75% cheaper than in the US). Granted, it's highly unlikely that Canada could ever supply that many drugs, but if the situation trends that way, the drug companies are bound to act.
Do Arora, Mackay, and the rest of the internet pharmacists up here think the drug giants would allow the situation to get to that point? Either they're lying, or they're naive. Either way, they're wrong.
Open Source for the Biotech world
CAMBIA, a non-profit research organization in Australia, has released
BIOS, or "Biological Innovation for an Open Society": an R&D technology platform that they intend to keep in the public domain to allow others to use and improve it in their own labs. Read
more on BioScience World. Interesting concept, but I don't know if it'll work in biotech. Computer science and software are replete with individual programmers who have the time, desire and resources to improve on programs themselves. In biotech, though, you can't just set up a lab at home and do some research of your own.
Art in Central Park
Christo and Jeanne-Claude's latest creation, in Central Park (image courtesy of
Slate):
Am I the only one who thinks this is idiotic? It looks like a bunch of gates from a hurdle race. I miss the days when art required more than just thought and imagination and actually took skill at something - painting, drawing, sculpture...whatever. Anyone can hire an engineering firm to build a bunch of vinyl gates, buy some cloth and hang it from them.
Illegal and immoral action by Ontario's anesthetists
Ontario's anesthetists held a one-day "study session" in Toronto that idled 70% of the province's operating rooms, delaying or cancelling elective procedures that many patients had waited months for. (Read more in the
CP article on the Globe and Mail's site.) Despite the group's claims, this study session constitutes a temporary strike, which according to Ontario law, is illegal, because doctors and nurses are not allowed to go on strike. The group stated that it only held the study session to highlight the shortage of anesthetists across the province, which they claim is having an adverse effect on the quality of patient care.
While they may be right about that, the shortage of anesthetists is no worse than the shortage of nurses, family physicians, surgeons, or any other kind of medical care personnel. For the anesthetists to use this sort of work stoppage to supposedly draw attention to their particular plight is disingenuous. According to the article from CP, the average Ontario anesthetist earns $350,000 - yes, that's $350,000 for the
average anesthetist - and they recently
turned down a 19.2% increase that the provincial government had offered over 4 years. If the anesthetists were really interested in alleviating the delays faced by patients because of a lack of anesthetists, they should have said "no thank you, Mr. McGuinty, we're happy with our incomes being almost
seven times the national average family income. Take your $6.9B offer and use it to hire more anesthetists instead."
Instead, in declining this offer, the anesthetists complained that their incomes have risen recently only because they're working "harder, longer and faster" than they used to. I don't understand - are they saying they shouldn't have to work harder, longer or faster in order to justify making more money? Isn't that the way the world should work? And in fact, does work?
Looting our future? Puh-lease
Saw the most ridiculous piece of "journalism" on CNN's Lou Dobbs show today, about Indian telecom and IT outsourcing companies buying up fibre cables that were laid by American companies during the tech bubble. According to CNN and the piece which was ridiculously titled "Looting our future", Indian companies such as Tata are basically pillaging the American economy by buying up unused fibre for "6 cents on the dollar". Apparently, the fact that no American companies are willing to invest
anything in these cables is somehow the Indian companies' fault. Why didn't they at least address the question of why the American companies would sell the pipelines in the first place unless they were making some money out of it - money that they couldn't get from some other firm?
There were so many insulting, offensive things in this piece that I don't even know where to begin. Since when do Americans occupy the moral high-ground when it comes to raping and pillaging other economies? American companies have gotten sweetheart deals in many situations because of actions of the US government; can you say Iraqi construction projects? If the Americans are going to complain about foreign companies buying up "their" properties that "they" spent so much time and money on, perhaps "they" should make it illegal for American companies to do the same in other countries.
Unfortunately, I don't see a written article on this piece on CNN's web site, so I only have my memory to draw on (I saw the segment while sitting on the bike at the gym), and the disbelief I was feeling at the time no doubt affected my own objectivity. But I am just
so disappointed in CNN. I've always given them the benefit of the doubt and felt that they were possibly the only reasonably objective news network in the US, but this piece just smacks of blind patriotism and a lack of journalistic integrity.
Apparently, I'm not the only one flabbergasted by Lou Dobbs' newfound obsession with Outsourcing America - here's an
interesting piece about it on the Wall Street Journal's site. The WSJ explains this obsession by saying that Dobbs is merely looking to increase ratings. While they may be correct (I wouldn't put it past Dobbs , or any tv personality, for that matter), that just makes his behaviour even more irresponsible. Journalism should be held to a higher standard of truth and objectivity than that.
Alzheimer's research
Interesting
article on the Motley Fool about the risks of investing in Alzheimer's-focused companies. Gives me pause, considering my company is finalizing a deal to bring an Alzheimer's related technology in-house. The Fool recommends against investing in a small biotech focused on Alzheimer's and to instead put your money into a large company such as Wyeth or Elan, which have Alzheimer's drugs in development but also have other research in case their Alzheimer's research fails. I couldn't agree more, if you're treating your investments in biotech the same way as you're treating investments in other industries; biotech is a different beast, though, and the risks are not for everyone. If everybody stopped investing in small biotech companies with limited pipelines, there would be little or no early-stage research for the Wyeths and Elans to feed off of to fill their larger pipelines.
Super Pats
What a game last night, and what a year for fans of Boston sports teams. Two Superbowl victories in a row, and the first World Series Championship in 86 years. With victory coming via a final score of 24-21 over the Eagles, it can hardly be said that the Pats won handily last night, but they showed yet again why they are the greatest team in the NFL in the past decade. Somehow or other, they just find a way to win, again and again.
Are they a dynasty? Not by a long shot. This word is thrown around far too easily by sports journalists, announcers and partisan fans. I don't think there's been a dynasty in the NFL in a long time, if ever. In my books, to qualify as a dynasty, a team must win repeatedly across multiple generations of players and teams. Three championships in four years is terrific and an accomplishment to be proud of, but they need to continue to win after this team has been gutted by the salary cap and free agency in order to be a true dynasty. Ask the Yankees or the Canadiens - those have been the only true dynasties in major North American sports, because they won championship after championship as players came and went.
Evil spam
I'm not one to defend SPAM and its perpetrators; I can't stand the stuff. I wish I could sue every single spammer on earth for the injurious effects their products have on the quality of my life. That said, I take issue with
this article from AP (here linked in the Globe and Mail) that reports that SPAM costs American businesses $22 billion a year due to lost productivity. According to the article, the average American adult who uses the Internet spends 2.8 minutes per day deleting SPAM messages, which Rockbridge Associates (who conducted the survey along with the University of Maryland) claims costs businesses $21.6 billion. I have some questions for them:
- Were all of the respondents doing the deleting at work?
- If the respondents are at work at the time, are they all at the sorts of jobs where people work exactly 8 hours a day, not a minute more or less, or do they actually spend an extra 2.8 minutes (or more) at work?
- If the respondents didn't need to delete spam, would they be doing something productive or just dawdling, anyway?
Not having access to the actual results of the survey (I couldn't find it on either the university's or Rockbridge's web site), I can't tell if the irresponsibility here is on the part of the surveying team or the journalist who wrote the article, but this kind of reporting of "scientific" research leaves a lot to be desired.
The ever-changing FDA and its impact on biotech
The Motley Fool had an
article last week on the proposed changes to the US FDA and how it might impact the pharmaceutical and biotech sectors. The way they see it, rule changes that make it easier for the FDA to pull drugs from the market due to negative post-marketing studies will undoubtedly have a negative impact on big pharma, but will likely have the opposite effect on biotech companies. Their argument stems from the theory that biotech firms tend to focus on drugs to solve heretofore unmet medical needs, while big pharma seems to be searching for "me-too" products that they then market the hell out of.
The Fool argues that biotech is almost all about cancer, and since there aren't any well-accepted compounds for treating cancer, biotech companies are treading on new ground, so the FDA will be easier on them.
For one thing, biotech companies are working on a LOT more than just new cancer therapies. According to the Biotech Industry Organization's
web site, there are currently 370 approved biotech products and vaccines on the market, covering all sorts of diseases including cancer, Alzheimer's Disease, heart disease, diabetes, MS, AIDS and arthritis. A quick scan of their
biotech products table shows about a 3:1 ratio of non-cancer products vs. cancer products. This hardly paints a picture of an industry focused almost exclusively on cancer.
Secondly, while biotech companies do tend to focus on unmet medical needs that may be given more leniency by the FDA, most biotech companies have no intention of becoming vertically-integrated companies that do R&D, manufacturing, marketing, sales, etc. This is the realm of big pharma. Big pharma may have been focussing on me-too products recently, but the trend seems to be toward pharma companies in-licensing products from biotech companies and then taking them to market.
While I don't claim to have the answer to whether changes at the FDA will prove harmful or beneficial to the pharma and biotech industries, I do believe that they will have essentially the same impact on both industries. As much as I respect The Fool, I think they got this one wrong.
p.s. BG, this one's for you.
Monkey Business: Swinging Through the Wall Street Jungle