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While flipping through my emails recently, I froze before an image that appeared on my screen. An old Rx colleague had sent me a graph, mapping out the 2014 U.S. sales achieved by Gilead’s Hep C drug, Sovaldi. It was stunning.

Peter O’Donnell’s recent Applied Clinical Trials blog, ‘Who’s in charge of Medicines in Brussels?‘, has been overtaken by history, with the departure of Guido Rasi from his post of Executive Director of the European Medicines Agency.

In response to a letter the European Medicines Agency received from the European Ombudsman on Oct. 27, 2014, the agency is clarifying its policy on commercially confidential information.

Johnson & Johnson completed the acquisition of Alios BioPharma, a privately held clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on developing therapies for viral diseases, for a total purchase price of approximately $1.75 billion in cash.

Merck KGaA CEO Stefan Oschmann spoke last week in New York as he accepted the two-year role as president of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations (IFPMA), the R&D industry’s global trade group based in Geneva.

The past decade has seen considerable growth in the Indian pharmaceutical industry. The country has emerged as a key supplier of high quality and affordable medicines not only to the developing world, but also to developed economies.

The Brazilian economy is being impacted by internal and external factors, and forecast figures are being quickly revised downwards. Market research released by Brazil’s Central Bank revised average analysts’ projections for economic growth in 2014 down to 0.70% from 0.90% four weeks earlier(1).

While emerging markets continue to represent a new channel of demand for pharmaceutical products, manufacturers have quickly realized that significant attention must still be given to more established markets, such as Germany.

The growing insistence on making healthcare more patient-centered - Europe is currently awash with declarations of intent along those lines - is generating a new level of interest in helping patients (or even citizens) to meet the expectations that the new orthodoxy is creating.

The Cleveland Clinic once again ended its Medical Innovation Summit with a list of 10 advances voted most likely to have a major impact on improving patient care in 2015.

Israel’s pharmaceutical market value will increase from approximately $1.9 billion in 2013 to $2.34 billion, a compound annual growth rate of 2.8%, by 2020, says UK research and consulting firm GlobalData.

We hear it all the time these days: research processes have to undergo transformative changes in order for research organizations to thrive-or even survive. Controlled clinical trials take too long and cost too much. Regulatory review is blocking innovation.

So now we know who is to do what on health issues in the new European Commission. Or do we?

A federal policy issued late last week appeared to deal a serious blow to continuing medical education (CME) programs supported by biopharma companies. But the specifics published by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Oct. 31, 2014 actually continue to exempt independent CME funding from the Open Payments reporting requirements for transfers of value from manufacturers to prescribers.

The challenge for senior leadership is to enable the layers of middle management to work to their full potential. Mike Straw argues that ‘failing fast’ should become the new mantra if pharma is going to drive greater innovation and creativity.

Last week’s Prix Galien Forum on global issues in life sciences was not without controversy.

Christopher A. Viehbacher resigned as director of Sanofi immediately after its Board of Directors unanimously agreed to remove him as the company’s CEO yesterday. Chairman Serge Weinberg will replace Viehbacher on an interim basis.

The global non-hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) treatment market will increase in value from $5.6 billion in 2013 to $9.2 billion by 2020, according to GBI Research.

By 2020, orphan drugs are expected to account for 19 percent of the total share of prescription drug sales excluding generics, reaching $176 billion in annual sales, according to EvaluatePharma’s Orphan Drug Report 2014.

After having already sequenced thousands of cancer genes in projects together, the Yale School of Medicine and Gilead announced they will continue their partnership to find therapeutic candidates for cancer for an additional three years.

The 2014 Pharmaceutical Price Regulation Scheme (PPRS), the voluntary agreement to cover pricing of branded medicines supplied to the NHS in the UK, included provisions for member companies to pay back to the Department of Health (DH) if spend went over pre-agreed growth rates.

After Pfizer’s aborted acquisition of AstraZeneca, will the drug maker likely approach another company for takeover?

The Cancer Drugs Fund (CDF) is a particular English approach to deal with rejections by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) for new cancer medicines.

An illustrious panel of investment professionals spoke optimistically on the orphan disease space in spite of concerns surrounding escalating drug prices in specialty pharmaceuticals.

The recent termination of AbbVie’s deal to acquire Shire has “jolted the industry out of its reverie” by becoming pharma’s first major casualty of new US tax inversion legislation, says research and consulting firm GlobalData.

Exits from the CMO industry are a more recent development that seems to be picking up momentum.

This month’s special issue of Pharm Exec Global Digest looks at..

After almost two years of anticipation, Janet Woodcock, director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, has administration approval for organizational changes to bolster programs and policies to ensure drug quality.