To avoid that, Merck structured its takeover of Schering-Plough as a reverse merger, with Schering-Plough technically acquiring Merck, and then renaming the company Merck.
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Pfizer has seen its stock under-perform some of its peers like Abbott Labs and Merck as the company continues to struggle with various lawsuits and complaints.
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This time, there was a committee, but it contained a Merck executive and an employee of a company Merck hired to help run the study.
After the war he worked for the Walter Reed army medical centre and then joined Merck, a pharmaceutical company, which, over some 27 years, provided him with the facilities to explore the mysteries of immunology.
Banco Santander of Spain, the French car company Peugeot and the German pharmaceutical maker Merck were all trading sharply lower after their latest earnings updates.
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Bradley Sheares was president of U.S. Human Health at Merck and had been in charge of selling the company's blockbuster drugs in the United States.
"Together with Serono, Merck will be a world-class biotechnology company and a major player in the global pharmaceutical market, " he said.
"Because Facebook is an important marketing device, the page is of great value, and its misappropriation is causing harm to Merck, " the German company said.
Now, he has sold his family's controlling share of the company to German drug giant Merck KGaA. And one of biotech's most colorful characters may be a little less visible.
Similarly, the company keeps focusing on when executives at Merck and Schering knew the results of the controversial cholesterol study, when most of their critics really accuse them of drawing out the analysis, essentially delaying when they would get a clear answer.
Merck was as insular as any big drug company, and was widely criticized for denying Vioxx's heart problems.
Peter Kim, Merck's head of research and development, said on the company's conference call that the study for migraine prevention was "exploratory" and used a different dosing schedule than other telcagepant trials.
Unlike the case with Zetia and Vytorin, Merck will pocket all the profits from Cordaptive, so the company might not mind if its new drug steals market share from its old ones.
But this time his company is too small to buy a titan like Merck, and the joint venture could discourage buyers:It contains a "poison pill" clause that gives Merck the right to buy Schering-Plough's share of the partnership if Schering-Plough is acquired.
This might be excusable if Merck hadn't been the very company that launched Vioxx--and should have learned the hard lessons about the unexpected risks that drug taught.
The result does give Vertex a leg up on Merck, but, again, the company is already expected to dominate and that is baked into its stock valuation.
"We just want details about how our URL was taken over by the company and we are wondering why this happened, " a spokesman for Merck KGaA said Thursday.
It's still too early to give a prognosis for Merck, but the company is still having some worrisome symptoms a year and a half after it pulled the pain pill Vioxx.
Merck has long said it is not interested in merging with another drugmaker, and neither company discusses market rumors.
The first study - involving more than 68, 000 infants aged six to 12 weeks - found a vaccine called Rotateq being developed by the pharmaceutical company Merck could safely prevent 98% of severe cases of viral diarrhoea and vomiting.
It may be helped by a bit of bad fortune for Merck: Zocor goes off patent in 2006, and it may lose some share if the company stops promoting it aggressively.
Two months after the committee said the drugs should be made available despite increased risks of heart attacks, the FDA banned Pfizer 's (nyse: PFE - news - people ) Bextra and placed its strongest warning label on the company's other drug, Celebrex, while Merck 's (nyse: MRK - news - people ) hopes for a Vioxx return were dashed.
The company's Merck-Medco division is the largest provider of pharmacy services--filling prescriptions and running benefits plans.
Bradley Sheares was president of U.S. Human Health at Merck (nyse: MRK - news - people ) and had been in charge of selling the company's blockbuster drugs in the United States.
Merck spokeswoman Gwen Fisher said Merck is confident that Medco's practice is in accordance with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, and added that the company did not want to make any further comment because it is in a quiet period preceding the Medco IPO.
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