The therapies, it's just like finance and the markets went past the regulators, and drugs are biotech are going past the regulators.
Some industry observers have said that Big Pharma firms should try to more actively license drugs from smaller companies and biotech outfits in order to fill out their pipelines of experimental drugs.
Amgen says it's impossible to make exact copies of biotech drugs and opposes automatic substitution.
The acquisition will give Pfizer a much larger presence in areas where it has been viewed as weaker than the competition, namely biotech drugs and vaccines.
Satellite communications, biotech drugs, and a few other industries have very high upfront costs.
Its homegrown pipeline of new drugs is rather thin, and competition to fill these gaps with drugs from biotech firms is fierce.
In this case, the DNA was constructed for Microbia , another Cambridge biotech that is developing drugs and creating microbes that can be used in manufacturing chemicals.
In June, the company announced that it was discontinuing work on two drugs, and, like most of the biotech sector, its stock has been battered: Shares are down more than 70% this year.
Nonetheless, Berry says that most companies are "making solid progress" in development and clinical trials and that Big Pharma, with pipelines running dry and blockbuster drugs coming off-patent, needs biotech partners more than ever.
It is working on better protein-based drugs, gene therapy, industrial enzymes, and ag-biotech.
Taking aim at diabetes, arthritis, lupus, obesity and cancer, the biotech house now has 40 drugs in preclinical or patient trials, more than at any time in the company's history and up from only 22 during the entire 1990s.
In addition to Sugen and Genentech, research powerhouses Novartis and AstraZeneca and biotech boutique ImClone Systems are rushing to test new drugs as VEGF-blockers.
For a variety of reasons, one could say that ZIOPHARM Oncology (ZIOP), a tiny little-known biopharmaceutical company developing several anti-cancer drugs, is now several notches above its peers in the highly volatile and competitive biotech industry.
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Both biotech and pharmaceutical firms might argue that the next set of breakthrough drugs are just around the corner.
Think of them as generic versions of biotech protein drugs, except, unlike traditional pills, these medicines are tough and complicated to make.
But drug and biotech companies have been slow to use genetic and biochemical information to create new drugs.
The biotech company revolutionized antiviral treatments for HIV making the drugs bearable and has continued to transform medicine for the lethal disease.
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It's the key difference between his company and Bristol-Myers, which has licensed most of its cancer drugs from the government or biotech firms.
Because existing treatments have such a low cure rate and sometimes unbearable side effects, biotech and pharmaceutical companies have been racing to develop a new generation of better drugs.
The goal is to move from having to merely tweak the proteins that are used as biotech drugs to being able to design them, even taking material from multiple organisms and using them to create new, functional genes.
Pfizer, Merck and Novartis have all said they intend to make a business of selling copycats of biotech drugs, protein medicines that have only been a force in medicine for a little over two decades.
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The tool is being used by 16 companies and research institutes, including Sequenom, a biotech firm in San Diego, California, and by the Indian government, to track drugs to treat a new strain of malaria.
The biotech wants the agency to change the way it grants exclusivity to fixed-dose combination drugs and hopes to win its argument so that more revenue can be wrung out of its recently approved Stribild HIV treatment.
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The tool is being used by 16 companies and research institutes, including Sequenom, (nasdaq: SQNMD - news - people ) a biotech firm in San Diego, California, and by the Indian government, to track drugs to treat a new strain of malaria.
In its petition, the biotech notes that the FDA has denied exclusivity to 10 fixed-dose combination drugs containing both new and previously approved active moieties for nearly 20 years.
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One of biotech powerhouse Amgen's most profitable blockbuster drugs will come under the scrutiny of the House Ways and Means Committee in a hearing scheduled to begin at 10:30 Wednesday morning.
The biotech firm has said that it is taking steps to refocus its business on developing drugs from proteins and that it is looking at spinning off units such as using animal organs in human transplants.
Isis, which makes drugs that work by shutting down DNA, is seen by many in biotech as having a history of overpromising and underdelivering, although it is close to having one drug, for a rare form of high cholesterol, approved.
Witty has abandoned me-too drugs--shutting down research into depression, anxiety, pain and other mature categories--and created 40 tiny biotech-style units that have autonomy.
It's the key difference between his company and Bristol-Myers, which has licensed most of its cancer drugs from the U.S. government or biotech companies.
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