In a rare move, Pharmalot took a very brief holiday at different moments last week, which you may have noticed due to the sporadic posting. We hope you understand. Now, though, we are back at our usual clip. And so here are few items that you may have missed while otherwise occupied this weekend, along with a fresh catch….

The Johnson & Johnson proposal to have the UK’s National Health Service pay for its Velcade cancer drug, but only for those who benefit from the medicine, was reviewed by The New York Times. The med can cost $48,000 a patient, but the drugmaker would refund any money spent on patients whose tumors don’t shrink sufficiently after a trial treatment. The idea, along with less radical pricing experiments, may signal industry’s willingness to edge toward a new pay-for-performance paradigm, the paper writes.

The newest type of HIV/AIDS drugs are causing a stir and The Philadelphia Inquirer looks, in particular, at the anticipation over Merck’s Insentress, which will be reviewed this fall by an FDA advisory committee. The backdrop is a horse race among the big drugmakers over who will get out the door first, and Pfizer is lagging since the agency recently returned an approvable letter. The story also cites a med by Johnson & Johnson’s Tibotec unit.

And this morning, BusinessWeek examines the ongoing debate over DTC advertising, which the mag writes may not die down even though Congressional proposals for restrictions went nowhere in the latest PDUFA bill.

UK drugmakers, meanwhile, told Parliament the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence is too reliant on a single means of assessing new meds - the cost per quality-adjusted life years (QALYS), a mathematical prediction of a medicine’s potential incremental cost-effectiveness - in deciding which treatments should be available on the National Health Service. It’s “like 10-year weather forecasts,” says Dave Brickwood, vp of international and government affairs, Europe, at Johnson & Johnson, PharmaTimes reports.