The Los Angeles Times just ran an editorial this week that caught my eye, mentioning a paper published in the London School of Economics journal, BioSocieties.

This is old news by now, of course. The paper was published online back in February and was meant, not as a groundbreaking study, but as a thought provoking piece designed to get readers to question the official numbers circulated by Tufts and PhRMA.

Last week, Gawayne Mahboubian-Jones, one of the key thought leaders of the pharmaceutical PAT movement, left a position at Optimal Industrial Automation, whose SynTQ software is finding more users in life sciences, to join Philip Morris International as Program Manager, Excellence in Science and Design.

Yesterday, I wrote on PharmaQbD.com about a new Morgan Stanley report which suggests that small-molecule drug manufacturers (and to a lesser degree biologics manufacturers) have very little financial incentive to perform their own research and development activities. The old arguments about keeping certain core competencies in-house and managing risks don't hold water anymore, the report says.

Drug manufacturers have had their eyes on micro-scale flow reactors and related technologies for some time now. (Here’s a big picture overview of microreactors in pharma from several years back, and here’s one discussing the benefits of microreactors vs.

I spent yesterday afternoon at the Forum for Medical Innovation in downtown Chicago, hosted by the Council for American Medical Innovation and moderated by former U.S. House of Representatives majority leader Dick Gephardt. The event also featured AstraZeneca CEO David Brennan as a guest speaker. David Brennan

The University of Michigan announced that, after several months of secret negotiations, it will purchase Pfizer's Ann Arbor, Mich., research facility. Pfizer had planned on closing the facility by the end of 2008, and may have ended up razing the site rather than selling off the buildings piecemeal, so the university is clearly playing the role of white knight. What it gets is 30 buildings and 174 acres of top-notch research facilities into which it can expand, for a fraction of the cost, $108 million, that it would have to spend to create the facilities itself.