Faster Entry Sought for Generics
Despite efforts to speed up approval of generic drugs, Americans still spend billions extra for prescriptions because of delays engineered by brand-name pharmaceutical companies. Pending legislation could help.

Biotech IPO Pipeline Fills Up
With the biotech sector surging this year, private companies in the field see a chance to pull in some cash. But follow some key steps before buying.

Financing On Target For A Stellar Year
It’s beginning to look a lot like 2001 – or better. In the first nine months of 2003, biotech companies raised nearly $11.8 billion in new funds (excluding revenues and payments from corporate partners), putting the sector on track for at least equaling – if not topping -the $14.7 billion raised in 2001. We’ve already beat 2002′s total of $10.9 billion for the year and chances are excellent that 2003 will turn out to be the second-best fund-raising year ever.

GM crops in Brazil
Brazilian farmers will embrace genetically modified crops, unless European consumers pay them not to …

Affymetrix sells new gene chip / Chip represents full human genome
Affymetrix Inc. of Santa Clara won the race Thursday to market a single gene chip packed with fragments from each of the 35,000 known genes that make up the human genome.
But two other Bay area companies, Agilent Technologies of Palo Alto and Applied Biosystems of Foster City, are close behind with their own versions of a whole-genome microarray, or chip.
The chips mark a major technical advance in the use of human genetic information to find new drugs, and eventually, to tailor treatments based on differences in each patient’s DNA.

Wound drug ‘could speed healing’
Early tests of the drug suggests it may more than halve the healing time in some cases.

Genentech Will Ride Out Drug Failure
Even Genentech gets bad news once in a while. But the failure of clinical trials of Tarceva, a pill being developed with tiny OSI Pharmaceuticals of Melville, N.Y, as a first-line treatment in non-small cell lung cancer was widely expected. The real test of the drug will come from other clinical trials already being conducted.

Genentech’s CEO on Big Pharma’s Issues
Arthur Levinson tackles drug pricing, patent disputes, consumer marketing, and stem-cell research

FDA’s McClellan Calls for More Sharing of Drug R&D Costs
The U.S. is bearing a disproportionate share of drug research and development costs for medicines used globally, FDA commissioner Mark McClellan said Thursday.

He called for more equitable cost sharing and price setting. ‘If we do not find better ways to share the burden of developing new drugs and biologics, all of us will suffer’

Drug Development, Genentech Style
“Its promising colon cancer fighter Avastin is a prime example of how the biotech ‘keeps following the science’”