Word: merck
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Brought in after a bribery scandal to present a fresh face of reform to German engineering firm Siemens, former Merck executive Peter Löscher has ratcheted up accountability and cut down on management committees. He talked with TIME's Bill Saporito about the challenge of change...
...riddled with uncertainty and unforeseeable complications. Last year's collapse of a late-stage AIDS vaccine trial involving thousands of volunteers is a case in point. The experimental vaccine used in the STEP study, co-sponsored by the National Institutes of Health and the vaccine's creator, pharmaceutical giant Merck, looked promising in monkeys but failed miserably in human trials when it appeared to increase the rate of HIV transmission in study participants. "In the end," says Wayne Koff, senior vice president of research and development at the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), "you can only extrapolate so much from...
...raids, early on Wednesday, were launched from Brussels to investigate whether big drug companies were fixing the market to squeeze out copycat medicines. They included forays on Pfizer, Merck, Bayer Schering Pharma and Roche as well as generic firms such as Teva and Sandoz. Hours later, with almost ironic understatement, the E.U. competition watchdog said it had merely launched a "sector inquiry into pharmaceuticals with unannounced inspections...
After nearly two years of waiting, the results came out on Monday on the long-awaited heart drug Vytorin - and the news wasn't good. Vytorin's manufacturers, Merck and Schering-Plough, announced that while the drug reduced levels of LDL, or bad cholesterol, in a group of 750 patients, the medication, which has been on the market since 2004, had little effect on the buildup of plaque in the arteries, a harbinger of heart attack and stroke...
...even there, Vytorin failed to show much effect. Vytorin is actually the combination of two drugs - one of the early statin medications, simvastatin (also known as Zocor), made by Merck, and ezetimibe, or Zetia, made by Schering-Plough. Ezetimibe is the first cholesterol-lowering medication that works by blocking absorption of cholesterol in the gut, rather than regulating the fat's production in the liver, like other statins do. ENHANCE compared the effect of Vytorin to simvastatin alone, and showed little difference between the two medications when it came to plaque size in the arteries. Simvastatin came off patent...