Another day, another positive story for Vivus

The promise of Vivus's Qnexa as a weight loss agent is well documented, but now data suggests that the combination of phenteramine and topiramate is also effective in treating sleep apnea. However it's not a treatment for apnea in the same way that CPAP alleviates the problem, rather Qnexa causes weight loss that can improve the condition to the point where it is not a concern to the patient anymore. Because weight loss has been known to decrease the severity of sleep apnea, any consistently positive results for Qnexa should be pretty easily result in an approval for that indication and concordantly, another revenue boost for Vivus (and whomever they up partnering with in the future). Remember, however, that Vivus has not yet submitted a NDA for Qnexa, so all this is speculation at this time...

See the Vivus Press Release here

Teva's management is looking for some serious growth in the next five years, so much so that we may be considering the company in the same breath as Pfizer, Sanofi, Novartis, GSK, and other so called "big pharma." Unlike other companies however, Teva focuses on generic drugs and they feel that increasing health care costs will drive patients to more and more generic drug use. This, coupled with the standard diversification of the company portfolio would certainly lead to Teva becoming a much bigger player in the global drug market. I like their plan, so hop on board, but don't expect big returns for at least several years....

Read the Bloomberg article for more insight

Maybe Carl Icahn has picked on Biogen long enough. It seems that Icahn wants a big piece of Genzyme (he bought over a million shares of the company last year) and he could be interested in forcing changes at the beleaguered biotech that has certainly seen its share of problems over the past year. Genzyme seems to have been watching Icahn's moves with Biogen and it doesn't look like they will play nice with the billionaire, but maybe they should. As many problems as Genzyme has had lately, maybe they could use a little shakeup...

Here's the abcnews story....