Brian Lovatt looks at how drug companies involved in oncology can meet their pricing and reimbursement objectives as NICE-style barriers start to rise across Europe.
Sarah Houlton outlines the deals, collaborations and controversies that shaped the pharmaceutical industry in 2007, and examines how the land lies as we prepare for 2008.
Discussing the importance of post-merger integration and synergy management in the generics industry.
China's pharmaceutical market place may have been booming of late, but companies wishing to sustain growth in the country must ensure their intelligence is up to the minute, report Songjun Luo and Brian Chapman.
Pfizer, Pfizer, Pfizer. Depending on your point of view, it's ironic, inspiring, or merely interesting that the company that staggered out of 2006 with its every vulnerability and vanity exposed in the media glare nonetheless finishes in Pharm Exec's winner's circle once again.
Over the past four decades, Ireland has developed a thriving pharmaceutical sector, thanks to a government policy designed to promote inward investment. It is now the world's largest net exporter of pharmaceuticals, with 29 plants approved by the US FDA. Initial pharma manufacturing operations in the 1960s focused on primary manufacture, and formulation into finished dosage forms followed later. However, as costs rise and it is becoming ever cheaper to manufacture medicines in places such as India and China, the country is trying hard to move up the value chain, into research and development.
CEOs saw considerable increases in the value of their unexercised stock options last year, with chief executives at higher-performing companies seeing particularly large gains, according to a new CEO pay analysis by Watson Wyatt.
German pharma has taken a slight upward swing of late, according to the German Association of Research-based Pharmaceutical Companies (Verband Forschender Arzneimittelhersteller [VFA]). The country was the world's most active market for mergers and acquisitions in 2006 (the first nine months of 2005 saw 35 transactions with a value of more than $7 billion); VFA member companies were able to increase their employees by about 1000; and funds spent by research-based pharmaceutical companies on R&D increased to exceed the €4 billion limit for the first time.
Andre Sawyer and Ed Lucas of mergermarket take a closer look at a few of the monumental pharma mergers of the last 12 months, and offer an overview of what lies ahead in this dynamic field.
