Hello, everyone. In between raking leaves, hanging with the short people and walking our faithful friend, we thought it might be helpful to offer you a few minutes of interesting reading. As always, there is much to track. Just the same, we have some errands to run shortly - what the weekend be without running from store to store? So we’ll leave you with these items for now and resume the usual routine tomorrow. Hope your weekend is going well and you enjoy yourselves….

MIT has a new project called New Drug Development Paradigms that includes drugmakers and federal health agencies, which hope to overcomes the bottlenecks in drug development, according to The New York Times. The hope is to create new ‘prediction models,’ share info about the biology of diseases and encourage earlier participation of regulators, health insurers, health care providers and patients. You can read about the program here…

Lilly is focusing on discovering and developing cancer meds as one way out of its predicament. The Indianapolis Star offers a primer with a few useful insights into Lilly’s situation and its approach to drug discovery. You can read that here…

The results of the Artbiter 6 trial will be known tomorrow, although The New York Times ran a preview the other day that attempts to dissect the significance for Merck and its Vytorin and Zetia cholesterol pills, and Merck issued a press release reiterating its commitment to cardiovascular research (marking the second consecutive years its done so; see here). CardioBrief puts it in perspective.

And DrugChannels points out that Express Scripts signed a deal with China’s Sea Rainbow Holdings, and offers some insight into what this may mean for drugmakers hoping to expand rapidly into the Chinese market (see here).

Couch thx to Keko on Flickr Creative Commons