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Schering Plough has said they will remain independent and are not looking for mergers at this time.

Schering’s Hassan Says Company Will Stay Independent

While this may be admirable, I don’t know if they can keep up with all the other larger companies. Bristol-Myers Squibb is another one that will in my opinion be gobbled up by someone else in the not to distant future. The pressure to continue growth and adding new chemical entities to the pipeline is strong and I think investors may overlook those who aren’t on the merging track.

i personally don’t think mergers are the answer to some of the current problems associated with discovering new drug candidates. I take the view that there are other things that can be done to improved the productivity. And moving the bottlenecks from one place to another is not the answer either. Many companies and services are focused on getting more candidates into development. However, having spent over 14 years on the development and manufacturing side of things, this many times only results in more projects of lower quality and spending money and then failing on the development side is much more expensive.

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One of the great products released at the recent Podcast Expo was Levelator from Gigavox Media. This is a very easy to use and runs on any platform since it is Java based (actually it’s in C++ but has a Java wrapper). I’ve used it and it does indeed work well, although I’ve not had a audio file that really pushes it to its limit.

Basically it takes any WAV or aiff file and will level the sound volume. This is particularly useful if you do live interviews or have a situation where the levels are uneven.

And the best part is it’s free. Note though that it is still beta and almost certainly has bugs in it.

Here is Michael Geoghegan CEO of Gigavox, posting about Levelator on his blog.

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Last week there was an article about a study in the New England Journal of Medicine that basically came to the conclusion that common antipsychotic medications do not particularly help Alzheimer’s patients.

No sign antipsychotics a great help to Alzheimer’s patients: study - Yahoo! News

The drugs they looked at were olanzapine (Zyprexa), quetiapine (Seroquel) and risperidone (Risperdal). While they did have some beneficial effects, the side effects were not worth the small benefit. This is common for central nervous system (CNS) drugs and points to the fact that more targeted molecules are needed. This may stem from our rather poor understanding of the biological systems and mechanisms involved in how these drugs have there affect.

Side effects are the primary reason for not taking CNS drugs. Anyone who has had a loved one or a friend who has been on one of these or other CNS drugs can testify to that. Another problem, once a drug has been found that works and has few or no side effects, is that once they are feeling better, the patient thinks they can do it on their own and don’t need to continue taking their medications. I personally have seen this happen and it results in a roller coaster ride for both the patient and those who care for them. I found this to be particularly true for adolescents and young adults.

All of these are reasons I personally think more work needs to be done in understanding how these rugs work in the body and what can be done to improve the effectiveness of CNS drug by eliminating or reducing these side effects.

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Seemingly the last words on the acquisition of AnorMED has been sounded; Genzyme will acquire them.

TheStar.com - AnorMed agrees to takeover by Genzyme

Genzyme offer of $13.50 per share ($580 million) was better than Millennium’s bid of $12.00 per share ($515 million). I do think that Millennium may have been the smarter of the two by walking away from the deal although they are entitled to a $19.5 million breakup fee. Genzyme had to up there original order of only $380 million.

The Boston Globe then reported that Millennium is still on the prowl for someone to acquire.

Millennium renews hunt after losing AnorMed to Genzyme - The Boston Globe

So it seems the merger activity will continue. It will be interesting to see who Millennium has there eye on next.

Other Resources

• Yahoo! News Search Results for genzyme millennium anormed
• genzyme millennium anormed - Google News
• Google Blog Search: genzyme millennium anormed
• genzyme millennium anormed - Ask.com Blog and Feed Search

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