Drug pricing legislation will be high on the to-do list when the U.S. Congress returns from its August recess next week, as both the Senate and the House are expected to take action this month on competing packages of provisions aimed at controlling prescription drug prices.

SEOUL – South Korea's investors have become very interested in the global cell and gene therapy market. Licensing and M&A deals in the field have been active – a good sign for Korean biopharma firms eager to tap in.

Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. agreed to pay the state of California $69 million in what California Attorney General Xavier Becerra Monday called the largest pay-for-delay settlement received by any state. 

“It’s a rare window into seeing how the FDA makes decisions because the proceedings are open unlike many of the other decisions they make,” Audrey Zhang, a medical student at the New York University School of Medicine, said on why she decided to embark on crunching the numbers from 376 votes by FDA advisory committee meetings from 2008 to 2015.

HONG KONG – Samsung Bioepis Co. Ltd., a South Korean biosimilar developer, said the FDA approved its July 2018 application for Hadlima (adalimumab-bwwd), a biosimilar referencing Abbvie Inc. blockbuster TNF-blocker Humira (adalimumab).

In what it called one of the largest pharmaceutical settlements on behalf of end payers in an antitrust case in the last decade, law firm Hausfeld reported this week that it reached a $55 million settlement with Celgene Corp. in a long-running class action, In re Thalomid and Revlimid Antitrust Litigation. 

Eli Lilly and Co.'s FDA win with Baqsimi (glucagon) nasal powder, the first non-injected therapy to gain clearance for emergency treatment of hypoglycemia, makes the rescue of severely hypoglycemic patients quicker and easier, and coming down the pike are more treatments that could simplify therapy.

The FDA's Arthritis Advisory Committee (AAC) Thursday will consider a supplemental new drug application for Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH's Ofev (nintedanib) capsules as a treatment for systemic sclerosis-associated interstitial lung disease (SSc-ILD). 

The U.K.'s National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE) said Monday it will be reviewing the methods it uses to develop guidance on drugs, medical devices and diagnostics so it can optimize its evaluation methods to ensure high quality and good value. 

Given improvements that Basel, Switzerland-based Novartis AG made to its patient access program for Kisqali (ribociclib), the U.K.'s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) is recommending the drug, used with fulvestrant chemotherapy, as an option for people with hormone receptor-positive, HER2-negative, locally advanced or metastatic breast cancer who have had previous endocrine therapy.