Word: chiron
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Chiron's incompletely recovered operations contributed to a fifth consecutive year of initial vaccine shortages this flu season. But its largest shareholder, Swiss drug firm Novartis, did not dump its stake in the company. Quite the opposite. Novartis CEO Daniel Vasella decided to buy for $5.1 billion the 58% of Chiron that Novartis does not own, and the Federal Trade Commission approved the deal last month. But the California hedge fund ValuAct, which owns 5% of Chiron, has announced that it intends to vote against the deal, calling Novartis' $45 per share offer "tantamount to stealing the company." Vasella, however...
...vaccines have lately begun to look more promising. Wood Mackenzie expects the market to grow from $9 billion in 2004 to $13 billion by 2009. Why? Ironically enough, Chiron's 2004 snafu had a bracing effect on Capitol Hill. Beset by fears of a possible bird-flu pandemic, Congress last month approved $3.8 billion for flu-pandemic preparation, most of it earmarked for buying vaccines and medicines. The defense appropriations bill carrying the provision also controversially provides vaccine manufacturers with a virtually airtight shield from liability...
...Although Chiron has won a $62.5 million government contract to develop a vaccine against the currently dreaded H5N1 bird flu, which has killed scores of people in Asia, Vasella says the pandemic scare isn't what drove his decision to buy the firm. He points out that there's still a lucrative market for new vaccines against viral and bacterial infections that afflict developed nations, like meningitis and, yes, the flu. "New vaccines for diseases prevalent in developed countries could be priced very differently," he says. And scientific advances, he adds, may soon make it possible to treat a range...
There are other benefits to buying Chiron that Vasella doesn't mention. "One of the reasons that the big pharma companies stay in the business is because it does give you access to the very highest levels of government," says Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Geoffrey Porges. "You are perceived as someone who is solving a problem." That's an image any drug company would be happy...
...speed things up is to toss out the eggs and grow the viruses in human cells. Any virus that can infect humans will, by definition, grow easily in human-cell cultures, so that step could cut the incubation time to three months. Chiron, one of the world's leading manufacturers of the egg-dependent flu vaccine, is testing its first cell-culture technique, which it plans to apply to seasonal and pandemic flu vaccines. The Department of Health and Human Services last spring awarded a $97 million contract to Sanofi-Aventis, a Paris-based drug company, to develop avian...