pharma

The Justice Department said that British pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline has agreed to pay a $150 million fine to settle fraud charges stemming from its pricing and marketing of two antinausea drugs. The company is accused of inflating the prices it charged Medicaid and Medicare programs for Zofran and Kytril. The two drugs are commonly used to combat nausea caused by radiation treatments. story  

Software maker Per-Se Technologies and Wolters Kluwer said they would pay $1 billion to essentially split up Atlanta-based healthcare information provider NDCHealth. NDC had been shopping itself for some time. The deal gives physician services giant Per-Se control of the company's physician, hospital and retail pharmacy transaction businesses. Wolters Kluwer gets NDCHealth's information management unit for $382 million. That unit competes with pharma information giant IMS Health, itself …

The Food and Drug Administration said this morning it is approving Tygacil, a member of a new class of antibiotics developed to fight drug-resistant infections. Developed by pharma giant Wyeth, the intravenously administered drug has been shown to be useful against the kind of dangerous infections which have become an increasing concern at hospitals in the US and elsewhere in recent years. In particular, research has shown the drug to be useful for treating the "Superbug" MRSA. Tygacil is …

IMS Health announced this week that it is buying PharMetrics of Watertown, Massachusetts, for an undisclosed sum. PharMetrics has a database which links patient claims data to prescription claims data. That information is used by insurers to monitor disease management programs and by drug companies to help understand how effective their drug is in capturing "share of disease." IMS Health is the dominant franchise in pharma information and maintains a data set of all physicians prescribing …

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's "Cover the Uninsured Week" hopes to draw attention to the plight of the estimated 45 million uninsured Americans with an ongoing series of rallies, health fairs, clinics and other events across the country. Big pharma is, of course, participating with support coming from Pfizer and Merck. Website

The phenomenon of the off-label prescription has been an unofficially accepted reality in the healthcare industry for years. But supporters of evidence-based medicine continue to warn that in some cases, the use of prescription drugs for purposes other than that which they were originally approved by the FDA can be dangerous. In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Dr. Jeffery Avorn of Harvard Medical School and the University of Arizona's Raymond Woosely note that many …