Industry Overview

Contracts, Mergers, and Announcements

NDCHealth Corporation (Atlanta, GA) has sold NDCHealth Holdings GmbH, the holding company for its German information management operations, to the 49% minority stockholder and the former owner of the business. Crucell N.V. (Leiden, The Netherlands) has launced an evaluation program with Medarex, Inc., (Princeton, NJ) to optimize the application of Crucell's "STAR" technology in bioreactor culture. The program will be performed with a fully human antibody developed using Medarex's "UltiMAb" technology. TEMIS (Alexandria, VA) won a Best of Show Award during the Bio-IT World Conference and Exposition last month in Boston. TEMIS won the "Informatics Tools and Data" award for its information extraction server, Insight Discoverer Extractor v2. The system analyzes text documents and detects information that is the most relevant to users such as a merger announcement in an article for a financial analyst, an FDA approval for a competitive intelligence officer, or a protein–protein interaction in the scientific literature for a discovery biologist. The Insight Discoverer Extractor server can be used in 16 languages. Actavis Group (Reykjavik, Iceland) has reached an agreement to acquire Amide Pharmaceutical, Inc. (of New Jersey) for an initial gross consideration of $500 million in cash with up to an additional $100 million payable over two years, subject to performance. The acquisition provides Actavis with a platform from which to launch future products in the United States. AZO, Inc. (Memphis, TN) and Bachelor Controls, Inc. (BCI, Sabetha, KS) are opening a BCI office at the AZO facility in Memphis, Tennessee. The new alliance will include the transfer of AZO control personnel into BCI's new Memphis operation. The US Food and Drug Administration has approved the members of the agency's new Drug Safety Oversight Board (DSB). The DSB will provide oversight and advice to the Director of FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research about the management of important drug safety issues and will manage the flow of emerging safety information through FDA's recently proposed Drug Watch Web site to healthcare professionals and patients. For the list of members (continued to People)