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The Burrill Weekly Brief | March 07, 2011

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Editor's note:
The electronic edition of Biotech 2011-Life Sciences: Looking Back to See Ahead, Burrill & Company's 25th annual report on the biotechnology industry is now available. Click here for more information.

Looking Back to See Ahead
Podcast: March 7, 2011

This week we've gathered the lead editorial team from The Burrill Report to discuss Biotech 2011: Looking Back to See Ahead, Burrill & Company's 25th annual report on the life sciences industry. Peter Winter, Marie Daghlian, Michael Fitzhugh, and Daniel Levine discuss some of the most surprising findings from this year's book and what's ahead for the biotech industry. Read More Here

VIDEO:

Interview with Qualcomm's Don Jones
In this report from the 2011 Burrill Digital Health Conference Burrill Mindshare's Fred Davis interviews Don Jones, vice president of health and life sciences at Qualcomm. Watch the Video.

By The Numbers

Takeda Enters Schizophrenia Partnership
Pharma joins its Japanese compatriots seeking outside innovation.
Takeda Pharmaceuticals is teaming up with Intra-Cellular Therapies in a worldwide collaboration worth up to $750 million. The companies will develop and commercialize Intra-Cellular Therapies' preclinical selective phosphodiesterase type 1 (PDE1) inhibitors for the treatment of cognitive impairment associated with schizophrenia. ITI's PDE1 inhibitors are orally available and have potential to be treatments for a variety of psychiatric and neurological diseases. Read More Here

Biotech Industry Market Cap: $388.12 billion (up 1.1 percent for the week ending 3/4/11)

Performance of Select Blue Chip Biotechs
COMPANY
MARKET CAP
($B)
CHANGE IN
SHARE PRICE (%)
Amgen $48.79 0.16%
Gilead $32.38 3.48%
Celgene $25.54 1.39%
Biogen $17.14 4.96%
Genzyme $19.80 0.30%

Biotech picks up the pace again
Biotech nudged into the positive column by the end of the week after dropping 1 percent in last week. The Burrill Biotech Select Index gained nearly 1 percent thanks to solid performances from biotech's blue chip companies. Gilead Sciences saw its shares jump 3.5 percent after announcing that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had approved a change to the prescribing information for Letairis, the company's once-daily treatment to improve exercise ability and delay clinical worsening in pulmonary arterial hypertension. The company said the change removes language concerning the potential risk of liver injury from the boxed warning. Shares of Celgene closed the week up 1.4 percent. The company reported that the FDA had granted priority review classification to its Supplemental New Drug Application regarding Istodax for injection for the treatment of peripheral T-cell lymphoma in patients who have received at least one prior therapy. Despite another spike in the price of oil, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed the week up .3 percent and the Nasdaq Composite Index was virtually unchanged, up .1 percent.

 

INDEX 12/31/09 12/31/10 02/25/11 03/04/11 % CHANGE (WEEK) % CHANGE (YEAR)
Burrill Select 312.47 365.12 377.32 380.82 0.93% 4.30%
Burrill Large Cap 461.85 526.55 528.46 535.34 1.30% 1.67%
Burrill Mid-Cap 166.01 218.10 210.07 214.57 2.14% -1.62%
Burrill Small Cap 88.12 94.97 93.52 94.88 1.45% -0.09%
Burrill Genomics 159.87 163.44 160.62 162.18 0.97% -0.77%
Burrill BioGreenTech 126.80 152.78 162.71 164.55 1.13% 7.70%
Burrill Diagnostics 147.96 158.05 168.70 171.25 1.51% 8.35%
Burrill Personalized Medicine 91.71 106.26 109.80 111.32 1.38% 4.76%
Canadian Biotech 40.35 55.68 62.20 61.49 -1.14% 10.43%
NASDAQ 2269.15 2652.87 2781.05 2784.67 0.13% 4.97%
DJIA 10428.05 11577.51 12130.45 12169.88 0.33% 5.12%
Amex Biotech 941.92 1297.61 1286.37 1298.60 0.95% 0.08%
Amex Pharmaceutical 309.21 305.88 302.81 310.37 2.50% 1.47%

Daiichi Sankyo Acquires Plexxikon
Japanese pharma gains cancer drugs in potential $935 million deal.
Daiichi Sankyo, Japan's third largest drug company, is acquiring privately-held Plexxikon for $805 million in upfront cash and $130 million more based on near-term launch milestones tied to Plexxikon's late-stage experimental therapy for malignant melanoma. Read More Here

Amylin's Bydureon Fails in Head-to-Head Match with Victoza
The weekly round-up of failed trials, missed targets, and other business mishaps.
Amylin Pharmaceuticals, Eli Lilly, and Alkermes said its experimental type 2 diabetes drug Bydureon failed to meet the endpoints of a head-to-head clinical study that compared it to Novo Nordisk's Victoza. The news sent Amylin's shares down about 25 percent. Both drugs are members of the class of type 2 diabetes drugs known as glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists. Further evaluation of this data set is underway and, when complete, the companies plan to submit the full study results for publication. Read More Here

Not Tonight, I Had a Headache
Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs linked to risk of erectile dysfunction.
Use of a class of common, over-the-counter pain killers have been linked to increased risk of erectile dysfunction, according to a Kaiser Permanente study published online in The Journal of Urology. Read More Here

Getting Rewarded to Stay Well
HHS announces $100 million in Affordable Care Act grants to prevent disease.
It makes sense to pay people to stay healthy because it will save healthcare costs in the long run. That is the thinking behind the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act—that spending on prevention today will save on healthcare costs tomorrow. Read More Here

Diabetics Die Earlier than Non-Diabetics
Disease is associated with premature death from various causes.
A 50-year-old with diabetes dies, on average, six years earlier than a person of the same age without diabetes, according to a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Read More Here

Enhancing the Truth
Plastic surgery group suggested spin for implant-related cancer.
Following a webinar held by two plastic surgery associations that instructed doctors to downplay cancer risks and malignancies associated with breast implants, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is telling them to play it straight with patients and help build a registry of women with the implants. Read More Here

Everything that reduces short-term costs is defined as a benefit to the patient.
Plastic surgery group suggested spin for implant-related cancer.
"Newspeak," as you Orwellian cognoscenti know, is the official language of Oceania – the land ruled by Big Brother. Newspeak was designed "not to extend but to diminish the range of thought" (author's original italics). Its goal was to "make all other modes of thought impossible." Read More Here

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The Burrill Weekly Brief | March 14, 2011
The Burrill Weekly Brief | February 28, 2011
The Burrill Weekly Brief | February 22, 2011
The Burrill Weekly Brief | February 14, 2011
The Burrill Weekly Brief | February 07, 2011
The Burrill Weekly Brief | January 31, 2011
The Burrill Weekly Brief | January 24, 2011
The Burrill Weekly Brief | January 17, 2011
The Burrill Weekly Brief | January 10, 2011
The Burrill Weekly Brief | January 03, 2011

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