Biotech Blog

Biotech Blog Archives: March 2007

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21 March 2007

Looking beyond traditional markets

The United States is the world’s largest pharmaceutical market. Japan is the second largest, although the combined European Union is larger than the Japanese market (but smaller than the U.S.). Naturally, any company looking to sell drugs should focus on these markets, but there are reasons to reach out into smaller markets:
This article describes a [...]

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16 March 2007

Price controls and compulsory licensing give buyers more power … for a price.

Countries use various methods to control drug expenditures. Beyond simple negotiation, countries can also implement price controls or use WTO-authorized compulsory licensing, which enables a country to produce generic versions of branded drugs if they face a health crisis without violating international patent agreements.
The United States threatened to use compulsory licensing to acquire cheap stocks [...]

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13 March 2007

Carnival of Biotechnology

Investing and Clinical Trials

PharmaGossip has an illuminating excerpt from The End of Medicine describing a method to invest in drug companies as they progress through clinical trials.
Ted Love, CEO of Nuvelo Inc., explains how biotechnology companies are frequently able to recover from seemingly disastrous clinical trial failures.
Patents
When manufacturers seeking to sell generic drugs challenge patents [...]

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5 March 2007

Why are biogenerics so hard to regulate?

There’s been a lot of press floating around lately about the push to develop a framework for biogeneric (or biosimilar, or follow-on, etc.) approvals.
Why are biogenerics so hard to regulate? Why can’t they just follow the same path as traditional generic drugs? The answer lies in their size and complexity. I’ll use the following excerpt [...]