Category: Pharmaceuticals

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ENGLISH! DO YOU SPEAK IT?

I had to read several paragraphs into this press release —

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— before I realized that Merck KGaA’s bio-unit was not actually planning to exit San Diego.

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Payback!

Evidently, if you click through this

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and order a Kindle 2 from Amazon, I’ll get a 10% kickback!

I really like my v.1 Kindle, and the improvements in v.2 aren’t significant enough for me to upgrade, but if you’re on the fence about whether to get one, you can read my rambles about the device in general here, here, and here.

My biggest complaint remains that the store doesn’t have all the semi-obscure (read: less commercial) stuff that I read, esp. that Everyman’s edition of Montaigne.

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My biggest fault? Well, I’m a bit of a perfectionist. . .

Merck gave a “state of the biz-nass” presentation today. Here’s their statement about it. As with every other major pharma company, they plan to

  1. develop more vaccines and biologic drugs
  2. sell more in emerging markets like India and China
  3. use “diversity” when they mean “diversification”

My favorite statement was this sentence on the company’s “focus”:

The Company is focused on developing novel, best-in-class or follow-on treatments for patients in primary care, specialty care, and hospital settings.

That is, they’re “focused” on making all types of drugs for all settings.

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Quote of the day

From the biotech interview that I’m transcribing:

We can never say that there’ll be sufficient analytics to declare that one biotech product is equivalent to the other. That’s why they’re called biosimilars and not biogenerics. It’s the stuff you can’t measure that can kill you. Sometimes.