Group sales at Roche were flat in 2010 reflecting a decline in influenza product sales and the impact of lower US and European healthcare spending. Restructuring measures cost the company CHF 1.3 billion (€1 billion) last year.
Novo Nordisk A/S’s comprehensive diabetes franchise continued to flourish in 2010 with sales of diabetes products rising by 21.9% to DKK 45,710 million (€6,132 million), the company announced.
Eli Lilly Company and Bristol-Myers Squibb have announced the stopping of enrollment in one of their two global Phase 3 studies of necitumumab, an investigational treatment for first-line advanced non-small cell lung cancer.
The European Union has allocated €3.3 million to a gene therapy consortium which is working on a possible treatment for acute intermittent porphyria (AIP), a metabolic disorder. A treatment has been developed by Amsterdam Molecular Therapeutics (AMT).
Pfizer Inc has announced plans to exit from research into allergy and respiratory medicines and to close its site in Sandwich UK which houses these activities. The decision is expected to result in the loss of more than 2,000 jobs.
Shares of Antisoma Plc plunged on the London Stock Exchange after the company announced the failure of a Phase 3 cancer trial, the second late-stage product in the company’s pipeline to have failed in just under a year.
The US Food and Drug Administration has approved Novartis’s quadrivalent meningococcal vaccine, Menveo, for children from two to 10 years. But it has turned back an application from the Swiss company for use of the vaccine in infants.
The US Food and Drug Administration has approved Rituxan/MabThera (rituximab) as a maintenance treatment for patients with advanced follicular lymphoma who responded to initial treatment with the antibody, plus chemotherapy, Roche said.
The US subsidiary of H. Lundbeck A/S has entered into a research collaboration with the University of Massachusetts Medical School to study an RNAi-based therapy as a possible treatment for Huntington’s disease.
Novartis AG said that recently launched products represented 21% of sales in 2010, a year during which 13 medicines received regulatory approvals. Net sales rose by 14% in constant currencies to $50.6 billion.