Next frontier is to treat superbugs like street thugs

WASHINGTON - Think of germs as gangsters. One thug lurking on a corner you might outrun, but a dozen swaggering down the street? Yikes.

Bacteria make their own gangs, clustering quietly in the body until there's a large enough group to begin an attack. This is the next frontier in fighting drug-resistant superbugs.

The idea: Don't just try to kill bacteria. The bugs will always find a way to thwart the next antibiotic.

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MSNBC.com

Dec. 27 (Bloomberg) -- WuXi Pharmatech Inc., a decade-old drug research company in the industrial outskirts of Shanghai, will employ more chemists next year than Pfizer Inc., the world's largest producer of medicines.

That's because Pfizer and rivals such as AstraZeneca Plc and Merck & Co. are turning to WuXi to help them find the next $1 billion treatment.

For the biggest pharmaceutical companies, being first with a new medicine is crucial as generic copies of their most popular brands erode sales. The shift to research labs in China is reducing expenses as U.S. and European drugmakers cut thousands of jobs. Meanwhile, WuXi is flourishing, doubling in market value in its first four months as a public company.

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Bloomberg.com

Two top analysts share their thoughts on the 2008 prospects for drug and biotech stocks.

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Forbes.com

Dec. 24 (Bloomberg) -- Colleen Cheng and Angel Chen, Chinese marketing executives in their 30s, should be the ideal customers for U.S. and European drugmakers. So far, they are a tough sell.

Glued to their cell phones at an expensive Beijing restaurant, the working moms would fit in at any cafe in New York or London with their fluent English and stylish clothing. They spend hundreds of dollars monthly on herbs, acupuncture and supplements. What they don't buy are Western pharmaceuticals, like Johnson & Johnson's cold medicine Sudafed and Sanofi- Aventis SA's sleeping pill Ambien.

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Bloomberg.com

There is a new nuclear arms race under way — in hospitals.

Medical centers are rushing to turn nuclear particle accelerators, formerly used only for exotic physics research, into the latest weapons against cancer.

Some experts say the push reflects the best and worst of the nation’s market-based health care system, which tends to pursue the latest, most expensive treatments — without much evidence of improved health — even as soaring costs add to the nation’s economic burden.

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Nytimes.com

For a perfectly healthy woman, Dianne Kerley has had quite a few medical tests in recent years: M.R.I. and PET scans of her brain, two spinal taps and hours of memory and thinking tests.

Ms. Kerley, 52, has spent much of her life in the shadow of an illness that gradually destroys memory, personality and the ability to think, speak and live independently. Her mother, grandmother and a maternal great-aunt all developed Alzheimer’s disease. Her mother, 78, is in a nursing home in the advanced stages of dementia, helpless and barely responsive.

“She’s in her own private purgatory,” Ms. Kerley said.

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Nytimes.com

When Merck and Schering-Plough delayed results of a clinical trial aimed at showing the benefits of Vytorin, a top cholesterol drug, they said more time was needed to ensure the validity of the data.

But for years, cardiologists questioned the study, wondering if it could ever prove the drug worked as marketed. Does the drug reduce heart attacks as the companies say it does? Maybe, experts say. The study just may not be able to prove it.

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Forbes.com

Dec. 17 (Bloomberg) -- Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. and Astellas Pharma Inc., Japan's largest drugmakers, fell in Tokyo trading on a newspaper report that the health ministry will cut subsidies on prescription medicines.

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Bloomberg.com

Finding the Optimal Window of Operation and Steering Clear of Bottlenecks

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Genengnews.com

Kansas doctor, wife charged with illegally prescribing drugs

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MANBC.com