Ranbaxy, an Indian drug firm, has developed controlled-release systems that allow patients to take only one pill a day instead of several small doses.
That prompted outrage among Arena shareholders who have spent thousands of hours on their own scientific analyses, contacted Congress, set up an online petition and flooded the FDA with comments saying the agency didn't give the diet pill a fair hearing.
"You make a pill for a nickel and sell it for four dollars, " he says.
"This goes beyond what a pill or a scalpel can do", says Dr Okarma.
The most promising: a pill called a CETP inhibitor, which raises good cholesterol and may reduce cardiac inflammation and heart disease.
If a pill cures a headache, we do not ask too often if the headache might have gone away by itself.
Familiar clouds gathered above my head, and I couldn't make them go away with a pill or a movie or a walk.
Genetic engineering is more permanent than a pill or a summer-school class.
She may recommend a pill for a short period, but don't be surprised if she suggests some tests or other non drug treatment options first.
To try to extend the lives of a pill, a company may patent it multiple times, protecting not only a chemical compound but also manufacturing methods or uses for the drug.
"It's not something that should be considered a poison pill or a hot potato, " said Gregory T.
Gilead pioneered HIV drugs that had tolerable side effects and could be combined into a single pill with a convenient dosing schedule.
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The two have teamed to market a combo pill in a 50-50 split and hope to win regulatory approval as early as July.
More common are promising molecules that flunk clinical trials and so earn no return at all, or drugs that shine for a few months before being trounced by a better pill from a rival firm.
In 1999 Isis' (nasdaq: ISIS - news - people ) long-awaited drug for Crohn's disease, a severe intestinal disorder, failed to outperform a sugar pill in a pivotal test with 300 patients.
Studies from Regeneron's middle-stage human trials released last year show that obese patients weighing 220 pounds lost an average of 4.7% of their weight, or 10.4 pounds, over 12 weeks, while those on a sugar pill gained a pound.
Now, it might seem crazy that U.S. taxpayers would be called upon to bail out, you know, the Royal Bank of Scotland, or UBS. But Secretary Paulson says, you know, these banks do a lot of business in the U.S., they employ a lot of people here, but you can expect that that will be a hard pill for a lot of Americans to swallow.
To counter the uninvited overture, Overland implemented a poison-pill plan a week after Advanced Digital's announcement.
Technical tinkering, such as changing the formulation of a drug from a fast-acting pill to a slow-release system, is a common tactic.
If BPA was a pill that targeted a disease, what would the pharmacokinetic studies tell a drug discovery team about its potential effectiveness?
If this was a pill or or a machine with these results it would be front-page news in the Wall Street Journal.
He popped an ivory lump slightly larger than a pill together with a magnet into a tube with metal plugs at either end.
Also exciting: a stop-smoking pill, a long-delayed inhaled insulin, an osteoporosis medicine, a sleep drug and an antibiotic that can treat infections in a single dose.
In future, therefore, it may be possible to pop a pill or have a shot to keep you both free of heart disease and lithe of limb.
Someday, you might go to the doctor, and the doctor may prescribe a pill, and in that pill may be a microbe or a collection of microbes that have met FDA standards upon which you can make health claims based on that treatment.
Leading antiabortion groups typically have given lukewarm support to restricting the procedure early in pregnancy, saying they think they have stronger legal grounds for tightening access to abortion through controls on clinics and regulating abortions carried out using a pill rather than a surgical procedure.
Alkermes, which specializes in developing technologies that deliver drug chemicals to the body, figured out a way to turn the Risperdal pill into a shot, branded Risperdal Consta.
In a blow to an effort to develop a brand new type of diabetes pill, a panel of advisers to the Food and Drug Administration voted 6 to 9 that the FDA should not approve dapagliflozin, a new type of diabetes drug.
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