Drugs, Pharmaceuticals | featured news

More than 100 cancer specialists have banded together to persuade pharmaceutical companies to bring prices down, suggesting that the high prices for medicine needed to keep someone alive is profiteering.

In their quest for the next big drug discovery, pharmaceutical companies are increasingly teaming up with some of the nation's top universities, recruiting campus scientists as partners and offering schools multimillion-dollar deals to work on experimental drugs in development.

Abbott Laboratories said it reached an agreement with the federal government and most states to pay $1.6 billion in connection with its marketing of the anti-seizure drug Depakote... The four whistle-blowers are to share $84 million in federal rewards and $22 million for state-level claims...

New data on an experimental drug combination being developed by Vertex Pharmaceuticals of Cambridge, Mass., should give hope to tens of thousands of people suffering from cystic fibrosis, the deadly lung disease that afflicts 70,000 people worldwide and kills most of them in their 20s. If the drug combo proves successful, it could also open up new avenues for genetic research to lead to treatments for terrible diseases, raising the possibility that pairs of drugs developed in tandem could succeed where single pills have failed.

The settlement is the largest yet in a wave of cases brought against pharmaceutical companies for illegal marketing of drugs.

A South Carolina judge ordered Johnson & Johnson to pay the state $327 million in civil penalties after a jury concluded earlier this year the company misled doctors about the safety and effectiveness of antipsychotic Risperdal.

Federal prosecutors in Massachusetts say pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline will pay $750 million to settle allegations that it knowingly manufactured and sold adulterated drugs at its plant in Puerto Rico, including the popular antidepressant Paxil.