Logo

For the Rest

Dec 10, 2010

Johnson & Johnson bid 1.75 billion euros to buy the rest of the Dutch biotechnology company Crucell, reports The New York Times' DealBook, which notes that Johnson & Johnson already owns nearly 18 percent of the biotech. The offer for the company, which specializes in vaccines and therapeutics for infectious diseases, is 24.75 euros a share, and is supported by the Crucell board. The bid goes to a vote in early February. "While the bid announced Wednesday doesn't rival Pfizer's $68 billion deal for Wyeth last year or Merck’s $41 billion acquisition of Schering-Plough, Johnson & Johnson is clearly in a position to go shopping while rivals try to integrate their major purchases," the Times says. However, at Pharmalot, Ed Silverman lists some of the company's recent woes, including recalls and manufacturing problems.

Breaking News
The Scan

Study Finds Sorghum Genetic Loci Influencing Composition, Function of Human Gut Microbes

Focusing on microbes found in the human gut microbiome, researchers in Nature Communications identified 10 sorghum loci that appear to influence the microbial taxa or microbial metabolite features.

Treatment Costs May Not Coincide With R&D Investment, Study Suggests

Researchers in JAMA Network Open did not find an association between ultimate treatment costs and investments in a drug when they analyzed available data on 60 approved drugs.

Sleep-Related Variants Show Low Penetrance in Large Population Analysis

A limited number of variants had documented sleep effects in an investigation in PLOS Genetics of 10 genes with reported sleep ties in nearly 192,000 participants in four population studies.

Researchers Develop Polygenic Risk Scores for Dozens of Disease-Related Exposures

With genetic data from two large population cohorts and summary statistics from prior genome-wide association studies, researchers came up with 27 exposure polygenic risk scores in the American Journal of Human Genetics.