Financials
Biotech is harder than Philip Morris thought
Over the last two years, tobacco giant Philip Morris International has spent about $2 billion on a series of drug companies, conglomerating them into a pharmaceuticals division in a broader effort to diversify from cigarettes (which kill people) to medicines (which generally help keep them alive).
Things don't seem to be going to plan. The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that Philip Morris is now considering selling off a stake in its pharmaceutical unit or bringing in a partner with more experience in the field. The company has taken a nearly $700 million charge to reflect the declining value of its health business and recently postponed its prior revenue goals for the division.
Philip Morris raised a few eyebrows when it plotted a future in pharmaceuticals — "They're producing the poison and selling the cure to you later on," as one tobacco researcher put it — but early returns suggest the company might have misjudged just how difficult it is to make money in medicine.
Research
How do you treat a disease that hasn't yet manifested?
Despite years of scientific progress, the ALS field has had a blind spot: People who don't have the disease but have genetic mutations that predispose them to it have largely been left out of research and saddled with patchwork medical care.
As STAT's Jason Mast reports, a group called End The Legacy is out to change that, advocating on behalf of genetic carriers of ALS and frontotemporal dementia, or FTD, a neurodegenerative disease sometimes caused by the same mutations.
Their demands are straightforward: Carriers need to be involved in decision-making on ALS policies and priorities; they need to be able to access routine medical care, so they can monitor their own health and be diagnosed as soon as symptoms appear; they should be able to access certain approved ALS drugs, even if those drugs have never been tested in carriers; and they need to be included in clinical trials for new ALS drugs.
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GLP-1
The boom for weight-loss drugs is benefitting lawyers, too
The explosion of demand for novel metabolic treatments Wegovy and Mounjaro has led scores of compounding pharmacies and wellness centers to offer dodgily regulated and questionably safe versions of those medicines, and now the manufacturers are mounting a legal challenge.
As STAT's Ed Silverman reports, Eli Lilly, maker of Mounjaro, filed a series of lawsuits accusing four compounders of selling unapproved medicines and several medical spas and wellness centers of trademark violations, false advertising, and unfair competition by selling drugs under the Mounjaro name. Earlier this year, Wegovy manufacturer Novo Nordisk filed a similar spate of its own lawsuits.
Their cases aren't as cut-and-dried as they might seem. Demand for Wegovy and Mounjaro has made both medicines intermittently impossible to get. The law allows for certain compounders to sell copies of FDA-approved medicines if they're subject to shortages, a legal loophole that could complicate matters for Lilly and Novo.
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