Healthcare News

France's Sanofi-Aventis plans to make a formal offer of up to $18.7 billion for Genzyme after its informal overture failed to strike interest, sources familiar with the situation said on Wednesday. The board of Sanofi met in Paris on Wednesday and authorized management to make a formal offer of up to $70 per share for Genzyme, sources said. Sanofi has bank commitments of funding that would allow it to raise that bid if needed, one source said. ...

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) accepted a reworked request by Germany's Merck KGaA for regulatory approval of cladribine, a key pipeline drug for the pharmaceuticals and chemicals company. The move puts Merck back in the race against rival Novartis to market a pill for multiple sclerosis in the United States. The application was granted a priority review status by the FDA, with the goal of a completing the review in six months instead of the ...

The US Food and Drug Administration should better explain its reasons whenever it requires additional safeguards for risky drugs, a pharmaceutical industry group said on Monday. That recommendation is one of dozens expected this week at a public meeting on the FDA's risk evaluation and mitigation strategies, or REMS, a set of tools to protect consumers from drugs with potentially serious side effects. Among the FDA's tools are requiring drugmakers to provide information about those risks to ...

Cerenis Therapeutics, a French biotechnology company developing new drugs to boost "good" HDL cholesterol, has raised €40m ($52m) in new venture funding and appointed former GlaxoSmithKline CEO Jean-Pierre Garnier to its board. Half the new money came from the government-backed Fund for Strategic Investment, with further funding from existing investors Sofinnova Partners, HealthCap, Alta Partners and TVM Capital, EDF Ventures, OrbiJuly 26 (Reuters) - uMed and DAIWA Corporate Investment. Cerenis said on Monday the financing would help ...

Alliance Boots, the pharmacy group bought in Europe's biggest leveraged deal, has taken control of Turkish drugs wholesaler Hedef Alliance to boost its expansion in the Middle East and Africa. The British-based group said on Monday it had lifted its stake in Hedef Alliance to 60 per cent from 50 per cent and would increase it further over the next two years. Hedef Alliance's founder, Ethem Sancak, will remain as executive chairman of the business, with an ...

Sanofi-Aventis is far more likely to buy Genzyme than GlaxoSmithKline, which already has a presence in rare diseases via a deal with Japan's JCR Pharmaceuticals, industry experts said on Monday. Sources familiar with the matter said on Friday that Sanofi was sounding out Genzyme as the French drugmaker hunts for a large acquisition, prompting a 15 per cent jump in the US biotech company's market value to $16.7bn. The Wall Street Journal said Britain's Glaxo had also ...

Roche Holding AG’s Genentech unit agreed to buy rights to an experimental medicine being developed by NovImmune SA, a closely held Swiss biotechnology company. Genentech is gaining an early-stage compound, a so-called anti-IL-17 fully human monoclonal antibody, that may be developed to treat inflammatory and auto-immune diseases, Geneva-based NovImmune said today in an e-mailed statement. The company didn’t provide financial details of the accord. NovImmune has developed its own technology to make monoclonal antibodies, which are bioengineered molecules ...

Sanofi-Aventis SA said profit may fall this year after US regulators approved a generic rival to its Lovenox blood thinner. Earnings per share at France’s biggest drugmaker will be unchanged at best and may decline as much as 4 per cent at constant exchange rates this year, Sanofi said in an e-mailed statement late Friday. The Paris-based company’s previous estimate was for a gain of 2 per cent to 5 per cent. Novartis AG and Momenta Pharmaceuticals ...

Eisai Co and Pfizer Inc said they won US regulatory approval for a higher dose once-daily version of Aricept, a drug that treats Alzheimer disease. Eisai, Japan's No. 4 drugmaker, said in March it expected annual US sales of the drug, its flagship product, to fall 60 percent to $800 million from $2 billion between 2011 and 2013 with the expiration of its patent for the drug looming. The US Federal Drug Administration approved a 23 mg tablet ...

US health regulators approved on Friday a generic version of the widely-used Sanofi-Aventis blood clot treatment Lovenox, leading the French drugmaker to cut its 2010 financial outlook. The US Food and Drug Administration said approval of the first generic version of Lovenox was granted to the Sandoz generic drug unit of Switzerland's Novartis AG, which is allied with smaller partner Momenta Inc. Shares of Momenta soared 81.9 percent. Sanofi, which saw its shares fall 4.3 percent, said it ...