Author: Peter

There’s a theme developing in the 2020 outlooks Wall Street analysts covering big pharma are putting out this week: next year is looking good for the sector...Morgan Stanley’s David Risinger upgraded his view on the industry to Attractive from In-Line...“We expect novel disease treatments, combined with limited patent expiration exposure, to yield healthy growth in the coming years,” Risinger wrote. He also said that pricing in the U.S. would be “healthy” in 2020...Still, while Risinger doesn’t believe it’s likely that U.S. politicians will succeed in regulating drug pricing in the near term, that may not last. “The sustainability of high U.S. drug pricing remains a concern, and we cannot rule out risks,”...READ MORE

They were good sons with promising futures who died of drug overdoses less than two months before they were set to graduate from the University of Nevada, Reno...UNR seniors Jordan Watts and Ben Taylor died just 15 days apart in March 2019 from drugs laced with a fatal dose of fentanyl...Their mothers...say their sons were recreational users who bought a couple of pills, unaware they were tainted with the deadly opioid...The dealers pleaded guilty to drug and firearm charges that carry as much as 20 years in prison and fines of $10,000: Alec Donovan...Tyler Winters...Lucas Cueller...at least eight UNR students have died of drug overdoses in Washoe County since 2017...READ MORE

Two high-profile cases in the pharma world have featured similar headlines this month—and they're not flattering to the legal profession...In both instances, allegations of attorney misconduct have cropped up, shifting focus from the lawsuits themselves to the people arguing them...First, HIV advocates battling Gilead Sciences say a U.S. Patent & Trademark Office official harbored a pro-industry bias. And second, J&J lawyers say their counterparts in talc litigation stonewalled questions about expert testimony and otherwise played foul with the rules...READ MORE

Laura Joszt, Managing Editor at The American Journal of Managed Care. Welcome to This Week in Managed Care from the Managed Markets News Network

Israeli ministers on Thursday averted a health care crisis by passing a last-minute allocation of 500 million shekels ($143 million) to pay for new lifesaving medicines for thousands of patients...Israel is without a permanent government and has no state budget for 2020, meaning its ministries by law revert to the previous year’s budget with no new spending...Thousands of patients suffering from all sorts of diseases feared this meant no money to cover new drugs or medical technologies that they hope will save or improve their lives...READ MORE

CVS Health Corp and its Omnicare unit were sued...by the U.S. government, which accused them of fraudulently billing Medicare and other programs for drugs for older and disabled people without valid prescriptions...The Department of Justice joined whistleblower litigation accusing Omnicare of violating the federal False Claims Act for illegally dispensing drugs to tens of thousands of patients in assisted living facilities, group homes for people with special needs, and other long-term care facilities...According to a civil complaint filed in Manhattan federal court, Omnicare would often assign new numbers to prescriptions after the original prescriptions expired or ran out of refills...The government said this enabled Omnicare to bill Medicare Medicaid, and Tricare...for hundreds of thousands of drugs, under what the company internally called “rollover” prescriptions, from 2010 to 2018...READ MORE

Bristol-Myers Squibb Co...said it won a $752 million jury verdict against Gilead Sciences Inc in a U.S. patent dispute relating to technology for treating cancer...A jury...awarded the damages after finding that Yescarta, a treatment sold by Gilead’s Kite Pharma unit, infringed on a patent exclusively licensed by Bristol-Myers’ Juno Therapeutics division...The patent at issue in the lawsuit...relates to CAR T-cell immunotherapy for cancer...READ MORE

Nicole Grassano, PTNN, Pharmacy Week in Review, this weekly video program provides our readers with an in-depth review of the latest news, product approvals, FDA rulings and more.

The Department of Health and Human Services has released a proposed rule this morning that proposes to lower the price of drugs for consumers by allowing pharmaceutical manufacturers to import certain prescription drugs from Canada...In addition, the Administration has announced the availability of a new draft guidance for the industry that describes procedures drug manufacturers can follow to facilitate importation of prescription drugs, including biological products, that are FDA-approved, manufactured abroad, authorized for sale in any foreign country, and originally intended for sale in that foreign country...READ MORE

The gleaming white booth towered over the medical conference...advertising a new brand of antidote for opioid overdoses. “Be prepared. Get naloxone. Save a life,” the slogan on its walls said...Some conference attendees were stunned when they saw the company logo: Mundipharma, the international affiliate of Purdue Pharma — the maker of the blockbuster opioid, OxyContin, widely blamed for unleashing the American overdose epidemic...Here they were cashing in on a cure...“You’re in the business of selling medicine that causes addiction and overdoses, and now you’re in the business of selling medicine that treats addiction and overdoses?”...“That’s pretty clever, isn’t it?”...“end-to-end provider” — opioids on the front end, and addiction treatment on the back end...READ MORE