Current medical news and unique business news for anyone who cares about the healthcare industry.
How to make a billion in biotech: It’s much more difficult than the software industry, but the key to biotech billions for entrepreneurs and investors seems to be taking one or only a very few highly concentrated positions in companies that they developed over years of effort. So reports Forbes Magazine, noting that only three of its 400 wealthiest Americans made most of their money by spearheading the development and marketing of a new drug.
Going hostile: Valeant Pharmaceuticals, Canada’s largest drugmaker, has made a $5.7 billion hostile takeover bid of Cephalon, a Pennsylvania-based maker of pain and sleep drugs.
With the Rise of AI, What IP Disputes in Healthcare Are Likely to Emerge?
Munck Wilson Mandala Partner Greg Howison shared his perspective on some of the legal ramifications around AI, IP, connected devices and the data they generate, in response to emailed questions.
Defending home healthcare: Senators of both parties promised to fight against proposed cuts to the home healthcare industry, even if that means revisiting Democrats’ healthcare reform law.
Raising the Medicare age? Increasing the age of eligibility for Medicare to 67 from 65 would save the federal government $7.6 billion in 2014. The only problem is that it would end up costing those 65- and 66-year-olds, their employers (and former employers) and the rest of the healthcare system several billion dollars more than it would save Medicare.
Heart studies’ fatal flaw: It might be a good idea to, um, actually include people aged 65 and older in trials of heart failure therapies, since the elderly are the ones most likely to use the drugs. About a quarter of clinical trials in one recent report from the Archives of Internal Medicine excluded patients by an arbitrary upper age limit.
Heard this one before? Johnson & Johnson recalled another lot of Tylenol due to a musty odor that has already triggered five (five!) other recalls of the company’s over-the-counter medicines.
