| The MGI Deal Makes Sense
It looks like the rumors about one drugmaker deal have come to fruition. MGI Pharma (Nasdaq: MOGN) announced yesterday it was being acquired by Japanese pharma giant Eisai for $3.9 billion. Less than two weeks after MGI announced that it was seeking strategic alternatives, Eisai agreed to pay $41 per share in cash to acquire the company. The deal with Eisai makes sense ... for MGI investors, at least. MGI's top drug is chemotherapy-induced nausea treatment Aloxi, which constituted the majority of MGI's $289 million in revenue for the first nine months of 2007. Aloxi's sales growth has been anemic this year, though, thanks to generic competition hitting its rival drug, GlaxoSmithKline's (NYSE: GSK) Zofran. Aloxi sales are only now starting to recover from the indirect generic competition.
Lauran Neergaard: Certain chemo ups the risk of heart disease
Chemo is only one cardiac culprit. Other factors play a role, too: Chest radiation, the weight gain that plagues many survivors, physical inactivity during treatment and stress. "In the process of curing their breast cancer, we've exposed them to some pretty nasty things. And it's not just one nasty thing, it's a sequence of nasty things," explains Dr. Pamela Douglas, a Duke University cardiologist who is planning research into how to protect these women's hearts. "This is really coming at you from all sides," says Douglas, who outlined the "multiple hits" in this month's Journal of the American College of Cardiology. But much of the debate centers on who should use anthracyclines, including the best-known Adriamycin, that can damage heart muscle, sapping its pumping strength.
Police clash with APDM anti-emergency protesters
Smoking may be responsible for up to a fifth of tuberculosis (TB) infections and deaths world-wide, according to research presented at a global lung health conference in Cape Town on Friday. �Probably more than 20 percent of the global TB burden may be attributable to smoking,� researcher...
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European Panel Mulling Drug Warnings
A European advisory committee is recommending stronger warnings be placed on the class of anemia drugs that includes Amgen Inc.�s Aranesp, as U.S. regulators have already done. Even so, the recommendation by the European Medicines Agency panel still allows the drugs to be used when a patient�s anemia is less severe than officials for the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid specified in a revised reimbursement policy issued in August, Thousand Oaks-based Amgen said late Thursday. The Medicare standard, which would affect how much doctors would be reimbursed when prescribing Aranesp to cancer patients, has been strongly protested both by Amgen and physician associations, which patients would be put at greater risk for needing transfusions if they have to follow the Medicare guidelines.
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