Strategy

Your guide to the world's top 50 pharma companies. The giants may be struggling, but even in a tough year, the industry's most successful companies know how to hit the bullseye.

In these cost cutting times, no drugmaker can afford to keep shoveling money down the Rebate Black Hole. Here's how to optimize your ROI and push back against the growing pressure of third-party rebates

How do you find and license the best drugs out there? If you're Merck, you send scientists to go get 'em

Promotional spending is down as companies rationalize and optimize budgets. But in contrast to big changes on the sales side, marketers are still trying to make the old model work

Meet the Korean pharma consumer: affluent, aging, and crazy about drugs

San Diego's booming biotech cluster searches for its future-and yours

Small biotech company is creating a buzz with a diabetes drug that incorporates a component found in red wine. Pharm Exec talks to Sirtris CEO Christoph Westphal about the merger and the battle against diseases of aging.

Bill Gates and Co. officially released Office for Business Applications (OBA) for the life sciences industry. This set of tools allows software developers to build applications that seamlessly connect back-end enterprise systems with MS Office programs.

With M&As the new R&D and sales forces getting axed, the CFO is transitioning from background player to front man. A new survey documents the changing role of the pharma controller.

Here's the saga of how market research, health outcomes, and dozens of other tools that connect the industry to patients came to be.

...and other ways you never thought to sell your drugs

The contamination of heparin in China cast the drugmaker, its US supplier, and FDA as indifferent and incompetent. Then the story took a very strange turn...

A new study looks at the movement of thought leaders and medical science liaisons from primarily marketing to other areas of the pharma company. Though the shift might be minor (7 percent since 2002), it might be a sign of things to come.

The US pharma market grew just 3.8 percent last year, according to IMS Health. The big loser: lipid regulators. The winners: Biologic response modulators and monoclonal antibodies.

A review of a pilot ePrescribing program reveals that if physicians are given the proper support, the technology can increase safer prescribing habits and boost compliance.

Roche has always gone its own way with biologics, deals, and new medicines. Now that the rest of industry has caught on, how can Roche stay ahead of its time?

A new study shows that while doctors aren't in a rush to stop prescribing Vytorin, they are considering it less often as a first-line treatment option.

US officials think they can control MRSA and other "superbugs," but dangerous bacteria know no boundaries. What does the world do when its drugs stop working?

In the wake of the ENHANCE study, new prescriptions of the cholesterol-lowering drug Vytorin are dropping drastically, but calls to sales reps by physicians are on the rise.

Unlike Vioxx, Vytorin works exactly as explained in its now-famous food-and-family ads. So why are people up in arms against the drug? Experts ponder what went wrong.

Managed care pharmacy executives list their favorite pharmaceutical companies based on promotional activities and the ability to meet managed care needs. Novartis reigns for 11th straight quarter.

Bright Spots Are Emerging Markets, Specialty Drugs, Says IMS Health

Business intelligence in a time of greater transparency is a whole new ball game. To play it well, be sure to look for surprising insights, expand your list of competitors of interest, and don't let Google be your only guide.

Novartis forced to cut 1,260 jobs due to dwindling pipeline, Zelnorm withdrawal. The company also adds new pharmaceutical division head.

Cancer R&D IS booming right now. At a time of poor ratings on both Wall Street and Main Street, pharma can at least point proudly to its oncology pipeline as proof that it still takes big risks to make big advances against big killers-and win. According to a recent IMS report, the cancer pipeline contains 380 compounds, with nearly 100 in Phase III. The long-established standard of care-surgery, radiotherapy, and chemo-is fast giving way to a high-tech array of targeted therapies. These molecules and antibodies are designed to block specific disease pathways, and they are proving both far more effective and far more tolerable than the sledgehammer status quo. Since 1996, the overall survival rate for patients has jumped by 30 percent, from one-half to two-thirds.