Walgreens has agreed to pay up to $350 million in a settlement with DOJ, who accused the pharmacy of illegally filling millions of prescriptions in the last decade for opioids and other controlled substances. The nationwide drugstore chain must pay the government at least $300 million and will owe another $50 million if the company is sold, merged, or transferred before 2032.
Eli Lilly on Thursday reported promising results for a daily pill that could serve as an alternative to injectable weight-loss and diabetes drugs. One thing hampering the GLP-1 drug boom is the fact that they're shots — not oral medications — which keeps some prospective patients from taking them. Lilly — which makes the diabetes drug Mounjaro and the weight-loss treatment Zepbound — reported positive Phase 3 trial results for the oral medication orforglipron.
Pfizer is stopping development of its experimental oral GLP-1 drug for obesity after a patient in a trial suffered a liver injury potentially caused by the drug. The patient did not experience any symptoms, and the injury resolved after discontinuation of the drug, Pfizer said. After reviewing all clinical data for the medicine and consulting with regulators, Pfizer said it decided to halt research on it. The case occurred in a dose optimization trial, aimed at finding the highest tolerable dose in a short amount of time.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s visit to the FDA Friday was supposed to introduce him as a trusted leader to agency employees. It did anything but. Over the course of 40 minutes, Kennedy, in largely off-the-cuff remarks, asserted that the "Deep State" is real, referenced past CIA experiments on human mind control and accused the employees he was speaking to of becoming a "sock puppet" of the industries they regulate.
Peter Marks, the FDA official pressured to resign over his disagreements with HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., warned in an interview that Kennedy's tenure at the HHS has been "very scary" so far. In his resignation letter, Marks said he had been "willing" to work to address Kennedy's "concerns" about vaccine transparency and safety but determined Kennedy only wanted "subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies."
A day after deep FDA cuts rocked their world, drug and med tech companies faced another potentially big hit when President Trump announced a baseline 10% tariff on U.S. imports.