In a letter to Pharmion ceo Pat Mahaffy, Steven Cohen’s SAC Capital advisors contends that the biotech could be worth more as a standalone company than Celgene’s $2.9 billion offer, depending upon the results of a clinical trial for a rival’s key drug. MGI Pharma is testing Dacogen, a cancer med similar to Pharmion’s Vidaza, [...]

Wyeth forecast flat revenue and lower earnings for this year due to generic competition for its blockbuster Protonix heartburn med and other generic competition. The forecast hinges on keeping R&D spending flat and trimming other expenses, such as 10 percent of its workforce. The drugmaker reported fourth-quarter earnings rose to $1 billion, or 75 cents, [...]

And so we all return from the weekend. Hope yours was enjoyable. Ours was splendid. We managed to mow the lawn yesterday, a rare event that met with the approval of the neighbors (not that we care all that much). And we took the shortest of the short people on a hayride to pick a [...]

Bristol-Myers Squibb says profit rose 5.8 percent after its top-seller, the Plavix blood thinner, recaptured market share from a generic and sales increased for its schizophrenia and HIV drugs. Second-quarter net income rose to $706 million, or 36 cents, from $667 million, or 34 cents, a year ago. Revenue rose 1.2 percent to $4.93 billion, [...]

This is a big deal for any drugmaker or biotech that wants to make it in cancer. The annual American Society of Clinical Oncology conference begins tomorrow, with oodles of data being presented. The Motley Fool was kind enough to identify a few of the more interesting rivalries that will play out. Here they are:
Millennium [...]

Ballparking future market share for a medicine is always tricky, so why not survey a few docs? In this case, the drug in question is Celegene’s Revlimid, which is used to treat mulitple myeloma, but only as a second-line treatment. Still, the med racked up $320 million in sales last year and Celgene hopes to [...]

We knew the lawsuit was coming, and it’s going to be quite a dogfight.
Thalidomide, which Celgene markets for multiple myeloma and leprosy complications, is a huge product for the hot biotech. Known commercially as Thalomid, sales totalled $108 million in the third quarter, a 9.3 percent increase. That amounted to 44 percent of the company’s [...]