> Britain's Sinclair Pharma said it would buy two burn creams with the proceeds of a share issue and that Chris Spooner, previously CEO of HealthCor Management, would join as chief executive. Report
> The drug industry blog Pharmalot has relaunched as an independent publication under the leadership of its former scribe Ed Silverman. Report
> Ian Clark, current chief executive of Roche's Genentech unit, has joined the board of Dendreon. Report
> Amgen was upgraded to buy from neutral by UBS which lifted the company's price target to $70 from $63. Report
> Supplies of the vaccine for the garden-variety seasonal flu have run short as focus has shifted to pandemic flu. Report
> Vietnam has detected three cases of swine flu that were resistant to the antiviral drug Tamiflu, but an expert said there was no evidence the mutant strains had infected other people. Report
> The World Health Organisation plans to start sending H1N1 flu vaccines to poorer countries as early as next month, the United Nations agency's head of vaccine research said. Report
Biotech News
> Onyx Pharmaceuticals has struck a $851M deal to buy Proteolix. Report
> Heptares has landed a $200M technology pact with Novartis Option Fund. Report
> Alarmed by signs that patients in a late-stage lung cancer drug study were afflicted by a higher rate of adverse events than the volunteers in a placebo arm, Pfizer says it opted to halt enrollment until it can gain a better understanding of what is happening. Report
> Investors quickly mugged Depomed shares this morning after hearing that two late-stage trials of Serada--intended to treat menopausal hot flashes--managed to successfully achieve only one of four key goals after 12 weeks of therapy. Depomed report
IT News
> That data management has become integral to scientific discovery is inescapable. But as petabytes began to supplant terabytes in the lexicon of drug discoverers, companies like Google and IBM are wondering whether students will be able to break out of the PC- and cluster-scale mindset in which they learn. Report
> Standards and collaboration are helping to expand biomedical research and broaden its reach. The National Cancer Institute has revised the Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG) software that matches researchers with individuals wanting to participate in clinical trials, permitting researcher access to hundreds of thousands of new patients. Article
> Publicly available DNA tests from Navigenics and 23andMe intended to help consumers uncover genetic predispositions for diseases disagreed one-third of the time in tests on five people. The tests covered 13 diseases. Report
> Genome sequencing company Knome is incorporating information from The Human Gene Mutation Database into its genome interpretation services. Article
> While data volume is an issue for any company in the drug discovery business, it's frequently true that the bigger the organization, the bigger the data issue. Report
And finally ... New Scientist writer John Martin finds parallels between big banks and Big Pharma. Report