[AP, PharmPro] Novartis is taking legal action in Britain to make state-run hospitals use an eye drug that costs about 700 pounds ($1,130) per shot instead of a cheaper one that costs 60 pounds ($97).
In a statement, Novartis said it was calling for a judicial review “as a last resort” because it believed patient safety [...]

[Forbes] Sens. Richard Burr (R., N.C.) and Tom Coburn (R., Okla.) were last seen in this space proposing the best-yet plan for reforming Medicare. Yesterday, they rolled out a new bill, this one designed to significantly improve the regulation of drugs and medical devices at the FDA. While their plan can’t change the FDA’s fundamental [...]

[Forbes.com] A month ago, Richard Evans, a veteran pharmaceuticals analyst at the boutique research firm Sovereign & Sector, sounded an alarm that should scare anyone working at a large pharmaceutical company: he predicted that annual price increases would have to either end or be sharply reduced. This could literally do serious damage to the bottom [...]

[Washington Post]  Some of the most widely used prescription drugs, including those to treat cholesterol and high blood pressure, could be available over the counter under a new proposal being weighed by government regulators.
Food and Drug Administration officials said Wednesday they are considering waiving prescription requirements for certain drugs used to treat ailments like diabetes, [...]

[NYT] Profits at pharmaceutical companies have been declining or showing little growth for the last year as austerity measures across Europe lead to cuts in health care spending. Some analysts say this trend could continue until at least 2014.
Budget cuts mean that many European governments are not willing to pay as much for pills. But [...]

[By Andrew Jack and Kerin Hope, FT.com] Antonis Karokis’ medicines business is being squeezed by price cuts and unpaid hospital debts. But he is stoical – after all, he enjoyed the years of excess when Greece was an unusually large market for drugs.
“There were no controls on spending in the past, the whole system favoured [...]

[Geoffrey Rogow, WSJ] —Marijn Dekkers, head of German drug-and-chemicals giant Bayer AG, says consumers don’t give pharmaceuticals enough credit.
The outspoken chairman of the board of management—the German equivalent of CEO—says patients often thank doctors and nurses but not the companies that made the medicines that helped cure them.

Bayer’s Marijn Dekkers, shown in Sydney last month, [...]

[Washington Post /AP]  The Food and Drug Administration would collect hundreds of millions of dollars in new fees from pharmaceutical companies to help speed up the review of generic drugs, under an agreement with industry released by the agency on Friday.
The user fee proposal is one of three such agreements that the agency is submitting [...]

[NYTimes] ChemGenex Pharmaceuticals found out the hard way how important it is to have a trustworthy companion.

 The Food and Drug Administration last year rejected the company’s drug to treat a subset of leukemia patients whose tumors had a particular genetic mutation. The main problem was not the drug itself, the agency said. Rather, ChemGenex had [...]

[amenews] Medical practices generally earn less giving a single shot that protects against five diseases than injecting component immunizations separately, even though the same amount of counseling time is often required for combination shots as single vaccinations, according to a study.