“The Morning Briefing” is SmartPlanet’s daily roundup of must-reads from the web. This morning we’re reading about the pharmaceutical industry.
1.) Through 2020, the pharmaceutical industry’s support for the U.S. affordable care act will total $90 billion. Decision Resources, an advisory firms for pharmaceutical and healthcare issues, finds that annual fees related to the U.S. Affordable Care Act which will be levied on drug manufacturers will cost the pharmaceutical industry approximately $30.8 billion from 2011 through 2020.
2.) Pfizer races to reinvent itself. In the past, the company has profited from hits like Lipitor and Viagra, and swallowed up smaller companies from the 1990s onward. But it has no immediate successor to Lipitor, the best-selling drug in history, which lost patent protection last fall. The problem was punctuated on Tuesday when the company said that profit declined 19 percent last quarter, largely because of declines in Lipitor sales.
3.) Acura pharmaceuticals announces first quarter 2012 financial results. Acura Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a specialty pharmaceutical company developing products intended to address medication abuse and misuse, announced today financial results for the three months ended March 31, 2012.
4.) GP drug blunders hit 40% of the elderly: Patients given unnecessary pills and wrong doses. Hundreds of thousands of elderly patients are being wrongly prescribed drugs by their GPs, a study warns today. The pioneering research found that four in ten of those aged over 75 on medication had been affected by a medical blunder in the last year.
5.) U.S. FDA approves Pfizer/Protalix drug for Gaucher. U.S. drug regulators gave the nod on Tuesday to Protalix Biotherapeutics Inc and Pfizer Inc’s experimental biotech drug for a form of the rare genetic disease Gaucher.
Image credit: S.Diddy
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