Novartis’s Need for Speed: Novartis is partnering with Craig Venter’s Synthetic Genomic Vaccines in an effort to reduce the production cycle for flu vaccines from its current five to six months, the WSJ reports. Analysts say the Swiss drug maker could charge more for more speedily produced vaccines and could also grab a bigger piece of the global vaccine market, the paper says.
Sector Shrinkage: A full quarter of U.S. biotech companies were purchased or went out of business since the end of 2007, according to an industry official, Bloomberg News reports. An official from BIO, the trade group for biotechs, said 25% of the estimated 294 companies that remain have enough cash to fund operations for less than a year, compared to 45% at the end of 2008, BN reports.
Drug Combo Study: A new study finds that combining Plavix — the blood-thinner co-marketed by Sanofi-Aventis and Bristol-Myers Squibb — with heartburn pills such as AstraZeneca’s Nexium and Procter & Gamble’s Prilosec doesn’t increase the risk of heart problems, the WSJ reports. Researchers behind the 3,800-person study, published online in the New England Journal of Medicine, say there’s little reason for patients or doctors to worry about a drug interaction; the FDA, which warned about the issue on the basis of observational studies, says the study was too small to give a conclusive answer.
Boosting Protection: California will next year require secondary school students to get a booster shot of the whooping cough vaccine, the Los Angeles Times reports. The state hasn’t mandated a booster before, in part out of cost concerns — but that was before a whooping cough epidemic infected more than 5,000 people, killing nine babies, the paper says.
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