And so our thanks for your patience while we moderated a panel discussion earlier today. As promised, though, we returned to provide the usual flow of interesting news and what-not. Now, we take another break - to catch some sleep. We hope you do the same. But before you curl up, you may want to peek at these…

Another Pharm-Free med school? The University of Connecticut Health Center has joined a debate that is gathering steam across the country - whether to ban staff and students from taking gifts from drug company salesmen and other industry representatives. A committee of administrators and students has put together a draft of a policy, over concerns that industry marketing is influencing medical training and the prescription writing, The Hartford Courant reports.

Pfizer? Pfugeddaboudit. MannKind needs an outside boost to get its inhaled insulin off the ground, but the likelihood of that partner being Pfizer is unlikely. “I would be very hesitant considering what Pfizer has done with Exubera and certainly there is an opinion within the physician community about the way the launch was conducted,” MannKind ceo Hakan Edstrom tells in-PharmaTechnologist.com. “That would be a very long shot at this point in time.”

Glaxo is starting to garner support in its lawsuit against the US Patent and Trademark Office over its new rules. The American Intellectual Property Lawyers Association filed a friend-of-the-court brief, and IBM and ScanDisk filed statements supporting the move, the PLI blog reports. No other drugmaker, however, has filed such a brief. A hearing in the case is scheduled next Wednesday.