While You Were Hanging Your Stockings By the Chimney with Care

"It's a major award!"

Not many creatures stirring this pre-holiday weekend, but we couldn't resist keeping up our weekly roundups of what you might have missed anyway. Basically, not much. We guess it isn't a surprise that you won't find us keeping up the not-quite-rigorous blogging pace this week and the beginning of next, though surely we'll pop up from time to time to amuse those of you hard at work. For the rest of you, bundled up on the couch watching "A Christmas Story," be careful not to shoot your eyes out this week.

• Winner: IMS Health: Maine's state law that restricts access by medical-data companies to doctors' prescription information is unconstitutional, says a Federal Judge, according to an AP report in today's WSJ. You could have seen this one coming if you a) thought a previous ruling in New Hampshire pointed toward a similar result in Maine or b) you read about this on Friday (hey we told you it was a slow weekend).
• The Boston Globe ran a Q&A with CMS boss Kerry Weems on Sunday. Weems is on the road encouraging consumers to shop around for the best medicare plans.
• The Times profiles Renovo CEO Mark Ferguson, whose career has taken him from "dentist to alligator biologist to pharmaceutical chief executive eyeing an estimated £6 billion virgin blockbuster market."
• Ben Goldacre's Bad Science reminds us that particularly around the holidays, some health studies are too good to be true.

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Northwest Under the Hammer

Surprise! The lawyers are out to get Northwest Biotherapeutics—on behalf of their disgruntled shareholders—for the “materially false and misleading statements” issued in that July 9 press release.

Northwest, or their comms department, definitely messed up—we blogged the dodgy release and its subsequent clarification here, and claim no prizes for predicting that something like this would happen. This is not a case of suing McDonalds for serving hot coffee—the lawyers, for once, have a reasonable point. Northwest declared that the world’s first therapeutic cancer vaccine was available to patients. It wasn’t. The experimental substance was allowed into Switzerland—conditionally.

Acting on behalf of “defrauded investors,” law firms like Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro can see good business in the inherently risky, volatile biotech sector. They’re slapping suits about everywhere, it seems, including recently on GPC Biotech and Dendreon, allegedly for misleading investors over their cancer candidate’s progress.

Blaming the management is not always justifiable—especially at young firms trying to get their first drug through the FDA maze. Stuff can go wrong in drug development; investors not ready for that should choose another sector.

Trouble is, the Northwest saga will mean yet more lawsuits, and probably make these actions even more part of the biotech landscape than they already are. That doesn’t seem the best way to encourage transparent communication between management and regulators, and management and their investors.

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