James Murdoch, leader of News International, has resigned from the board of pharma corporation GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) in the UK.

GSK has explained Murdoch’s resignation after three years as being due to his planned move to the US.

Murdoch was appointed by GSK as a non-executive director and member of its corporate responsibility committee in 2009, on a salary of nearly £100,000 per annum.

His role was described as being concerned with “external issues that might have the potential for serious impact upon the group’s business and reputation”.

The company denies any link between Murdoch’s departure and the forthcoming report of the Leveson committee into phone-hacking at News International.

Praising Murdoch’s “very strong contribution” to the company, GSK Chairman Sir Chris Gent said: “James has taken this decision to focus on his current duties as non-executive chairman of BSkyB, and following his decision to re-locate to the United States, as chairman and chief executive, international, of News Corporation.”

Gent commented at the time of Murdoch’s appointment to GSK: “He will be an excellent addition to the board’s corporate responsibility committee, an area where he has shown particular leadership at BSkyB and News Corporation.”

Pfizer is working with a property consortium to fill its recently-closed Sandwich facility with life science companies.

The Discovery Park site, where Viagra was developed in the 1990s, will become an Enterprise Zone leased to multiple life science companies for R&D.

Pfizer itself will lease some of the facilities, where 650 of its employees still work following the closure of the main facility in 2011.

The site provides about 280,000 square metres of accommodation, including many specialist life science laboratories.

According to a Pfizer spokesperson, the company “has entered into a period of legal exclusivity with a consortium led by London & Metropolitan and financed by a major European institutional real estate investor for the sale of the Discovery Park campus in Sandwich, Kent.

“This announcement is a positive milestone in the transition of Discovery Park to becoming an R&D led multiple-use campus with Enterprise Zone status.”

Following discussions with London and Metropolitan, local Conservative MP Laura Sandys commented that the property consortium has a “very clear vision about having a strong life-science park that will attract people internationally”.

Changes to the Health and Social Care Bill have been announced in response to emerging cross-party opposition in the House of Lords.

According to Health Minister Earl Howe (pictured), the Department of Health will table amendments that preserve the responsibility of the Health Secretary to maintain the NHS as a comprehensive public service.

A further amendment will prevent CCGs from withholding care from certain patient groups on the basis of ‘lifestyle’.

The decision follows statements by the Royal College of Radiologists and the Royal College of Psychiatrists of their opposition to the Bill, joining the BMA, the Royal College of Surgeons and the Royal College of Nurses.

With the College of Emergency Medicine and the Royal College of Physicians also expressing serious concerns, Health Secretary Andrew Lansley’s repeated claim that the reforms have the broad support of the medical profession is looking increasingly exposed.

Recent criticisms of the Health Bill in the House of Lords have been led by the LibDem peer Baroness Williams and the Conservative peer Lord Mackay of Clashfern, as well as Labour’s Baroness Thornton.

The latter described the new amendments as a “massive climbdown” by Andrew Lansley, but said that attention still needed to be paid to the part of the Bill dealing with competition.

Concern has focused on the potential fragmentation of the NHS: both the scaling down of provision from a ‘comprehensive’ service to a ‘basic’ service, and the wholesale conversion of NHS services into private franchises reimbursed by the NHS.

In a letter to a group of peers, Earl Howe commented: “There seems to be an emerging consensus about how the bill can be improved in order to put beyond doubt the secretary of state’s accountability for the health service.”

Organisations representing hospital doctors and A&E doctors appear likely to add to the clinical opposition to the reforms. The members of the Royal College of Physicians have called for an emergency general meeting to condemn the Bill, while the College of Emergency Medicine has expressed serious concerns.

Napp Pharmaceuticals has appointed Dietmar Leitner as its new Managing Director.

Mr Leitner has more than 16 years experience within the pharmaceutical industry having worked at Abbott Laboratories before joining Mundipharma Gesellschaft m.b.H. in Austria.

The new Managing Director says he is “delighted” to be joining the Cambridge-based company and hopes to continue and build on its success.

He succeeds Antony Mattessich who left Napp in May 2011 to become Regional Director Europe at Mundipharma International Limited.

Napp specialises in the field of pain control. It has been committed to furthering the understanding and treatment of pain relief for the last three decades. It also has a growing expertise in oncology and respiratory medicines.

“Napp has significant expertise in analgesics, an expanding oncology portfolio and a very promising respiratory franchise,” commented Mr Leitner. This, alongside our very collaborative approach to business, will, I believe, be a significant strength in the emerging healthcare environment.”

Bioscience holds out the prospect of medical breakthroughs that can transform our lives – but it has to contend with traditional fears about ‘interfering with nature’. Maxine Vaccine asks whether fear itself might not be the greatest danger.

Everybody’s talking about biotechnology and its implications for medicine. Even the UK Government, hardly the brightest light on the Christmas tree, recently identified stratified medicine as a crucial area for medical innovation. The idea that drugs can be tailored to the specific genetic characteristics of a patient group is powerful and opens up a new vision of ‘personalised medicine’.

But with that comes the familiar fear among doctors and patients that the new therapies are ‘interfering with nature’. It’s a fear that runs through the history of medicine. Before the invention of the microscope, some doctors who argued that diseases could be spread by ‘germs’ were hounded out of their profession. Body fluids are ‘natural’ – how could they possibly pose a danger? The argument ‘it’s not natural’ has been used against hygiene, antiseptics, antibiotics, vaccines, transplants, transfusions, hormonal treatments...

But that’s all long in the past, you might say. These days we’re enlightened, we have evidence, we don’t listen to superstition. Well... maybe. Back in 1998 a doctor fabricated evidence that the MMR vaccine caused autism. He has now been convicted of fraud, but thousands of doctors believed him. Only this year, a critical analysis of the Million Woman Study by scientists who are not clinicians concluded that it had failed to prove a causal link between hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and increased risk of breast cancer – a causal link that had been broadly accepted by the medical profession across Europe and the USA, despite the persistent voices of a sceptical minority.

Is it just possible that where biopharmaceuticals are concerned, a significant proportion of clinicians are primed to believe scare stories because, at a deep level, they suspect that such therapies are ‘against nature’? Where HRT was concerned, after all, many thousands of women had been enabled to continue successful midlife careers without being nudged by the menopause and its traumatic sequels into early retirement. How could that be right?

Many people – and doctors are not only not immune to this, they may be more prone to it than patients – are driven by an uncritical reverence for ‘nature’s way’ to fear and resist the changes we can make to our own lives as our scientific knowledge develops. The recent decision of a European court to deny patents to medical therapies developed from stem cell research shows that the power of fear is still sometimes greater than the will to heal.

Of course there are valid fears about potential harm arising from science and technology. But the danger lies in the abuse of scientific knowledge for purposes of exploitation and social control. Where valid questions need to be asked about the ethics of medical science, those are not questions about the dangers of scientific knowledge. They are questions about us.

Deal-making activity fell by nearly a fifth last year as pharmaceutical companies reduced R&D expenditure and streamlined their activities, research has shown.

PharmaVentures found that overall deals were down by 18% in 2011 and licensing arrangements fell by 16%. However, M&A activity increased by 30% as companies sought to secure their futures.

Fintan Walton, Chief Executive of PharmaVentures, said the industry is “undergoing a rapid and major transformation” but there was still “significant opportunity for great deals to be done”.

Research focused on PharmaVentures’ database, records and working relationships from within the pharmaceutical industry. It revealed that although merger deals were on the rise, so too were the contingency payments included in recent deals.

Oncology was the most popular therapeutic area to dominate the landscape with Roche being the most prolific deal-maker.

Unsurprisingly, pharmaceutical companies turned to Emerging Markets – particularly China and India – to conduct the majority of their deals. AstraZeneca recently completed a deal to acquire Guangdong BeiKang Pharmaceutical, a manufacturer of generic injectable antibiotics, to strengthen its position in the region. Bayer HealthCare also increased its presence in India last year when it partnered with Zydus Cadila after Merck had created a similar venture with Sun Pharmaceutical Industries.

PharmaVentures is an international healthcare advisory group.

The World Health Organization has the support of 13 major pharmaceutical companies in developing a co-ordinated strategy to eliminate or control 10 key neglected tropical diseases, including sleeping sickness and river blindness, by 2020.

To read the full story, click here.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has the support of 13 major pharmaceutical companies in developing a co-ordinated strategy to eliminate or control 10 key neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) by 2020.

The global pharma industry will work with governments and global health and finance organisations to sustain or expand existing drug donation programmes, accelerate R&D and strengthen drug distribution and implementation.

In a joint statement, the ‘London Declaration on Neglected Tropical Diseases’, the partners stated concrete objectives in fighting diseases that affect 1.4 billion people in tropical regions, including river blindness, sleeping sickness and leprosy.

Medical research in the West has neglected these diseases because they are widespread only in the developing world and among poor people; however, they represent major barriers to the economic development of the countries affected.

Pharmaceutical companies involved in supporting the new strategy are: Abbott, AstraZeneca, Bayer, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eisai, Gilead, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Merck KGaA, Merck Sharp & Dohme, Novartis, Pfizer and Sanofi.

These companies will donate drug treatments for a total of 1.4 billion people affected by NTDs per year throughout the coming decade, as well as building collaborative R&D programmes and medication access agreements.

The campaign aims to provide the funding gap necessary to complete the eradication of guinea worm disease; ensure progress towards the elimination of lymphatic filariasis, blinding trachoma, sleeping sickness and leprosy by 2020; and achieve control of soil-transmitted helminthes, schistosomiasis, river blindness, Chagas disease and visceral leishmaniasis.

“The efforts of WHO, researchers, partners, and the contributions of industry have changed the face of NTDs,” said Dr Margaret Chan, Director-General of the WHO. “These ancient diseases are now being brought to their knees with stunning speed. I am confident almost all of these diseases can be eliminated or controlled by the end of this decade.”

Speaking on behalf of the pharma companies involved in the campaign, Sir Andrew Witty, CEO of GlaxoSmithKline, said: “Many companies and organisations have worked for decades to fight these horrific diseases. But no one company or organisation can do it alone. Today, we pledge to work hand-in-hand to revolutionise the way we fight these diseases now and in the future.”

To see the campaign’s video, click here.

Bristol-Myers Squibb saw net sales increase 7% to $5.5 billion in the final quarter of 2011, and record annual sales up 9% to $21.2bn.

Sales in the US increased 8% to $3.6bn with international sales also up by 4% after Onglyza, Sprycel, Orencia and Baraclude all saw revenue increase in the quarter.

Lamberto Andreotti, Chief Executive Officer, BMS, said the “solid financial results” conclude a “very good year” for the New York-based biopharmaceutical company.

But the company expects global sales in 2012 to fall to between $17.2bn and $18.2bn after the exclusivity of Avapro expires in March and Plavix expires in May.

In the final quarter of 2011, gross margin as a percentage of net sales improved by nearly three-quarters (74.9%). R&D costs remained flat at a $1bn with marketing, selling and administrative functions also slightly over a billion pound. Advertising and product promotion increased slightly in Q4 to $285m.

Global sales between October and December were led by Onglyza – which saw sales increase in the quarter by 110%. Sprycel saw sales rise by 34%, Orencia by 27% and Baraclude by a fifth. Skin cancer treatment Yervoy also generated sales of $144m.

The year concluded with BMS receiving approval for Yervoy and for kidney transplant drug Nulojix in the US and Europe, and for Eliquis in Europe for the prevention of venous thromboembolic events.

“Our delivery of several important new products to patients, the ability of our productive R&D organisation to build an innovative and diverse pipeline, and our continued commitment to business development gives us confidence in our future,” said Lamberto Andreotti.

Analysts have predicted that AstraZeneca is about to make thousands of redundancies at its two plants in Cheshire after disappointing annual results.

An official announced is expected later this week which is expected to see AZ reduce its UK workforce by around 3,000.

A spokeswoman for the pharmaceutical company declined to comment on the speculation, although AZ did release plans two years ago detailing a reduction of 10,000 global posts by 2014.

AstraZeneca, the UK’s second-biggest pharmaceutical company, has a total of 13 sites across the UK and employs around 11,000 staff.

Reports suggest AZ is set to forecast flat revenues for 2011 of around £21.3 billion and a 15% increase in pre-tax profits of approximately £8.1bn.

But the company has suffered a number of setbacks in the last twelve months in its efforts to find its next blockbuster brand. Its ovarian cancer drug olaparib was sent for further development after clinical test showed it to be ineffective. Compounds which were aimed to treat major depressive disorders also demonstrated similar disappointing results and were sent back for further research.

In the US, the company suffered further disappointment after the FDA delayed the approval of Brilinta and requested further data of the blood-thinning product before making a decision. This follows the discontinuation of motavizumab which led to a £287.2 million accounting charge, plus an additional impairment charge of £246m in Q4 of 2011 after a series of potential new products failed to materialise.

The company’s full annual results are set to be released on 2 February 2012.