This Week’s Biotech Highlights

This week, a deal far away from home helped bring closer to home one of the challenges facing the biotech industry. Abbott labs bought a unit of India’s Piramal healthcare, moving further into the generics business (at least in emerging markets).

The recent introduction of generic Lipitor in Canada is one example of the challenges facing pharma companies as current blockbusters come off patent and face generic competition. A lot of commenters have been expecting that challenge to turn into more money spent by pharma companies on biotech; but the Abbott-Piramal transaction emphasized that there’s more than one way for pharma companies to replace the lost revenue. Pharma companies facing generics competition will not save biotech companies.

Of course, by-and-large, blogging will not save biotech companies either; so I was out of pocket most of last week working on this deal. Now that I’m closer to my home again, stay tuned to The Cross-Border Biotech Blog and @crossborderbio for more updates.