Business briefs: Allergan, Amgen, Wiley
Allergan's 2013 outlook was a bright spot for Credit Suisse analyst Catherine Arnold, who noted in her Tuesday research note that “for the first time in four years, Allergan's midpoint of initial guidance is not beneath consensus.” Arnold wrote that the Irvine, Calif., company's forecast is probably conservative, and underscores its “attractive long-term growth strategy.” The drug maker's guidance for this year breaks out as follows: sales of between $6 billion and $6.2 billion, with specialty pharma accounting for approximately $5 billion to $5.3 billion. The launchpad for these numbers were fourth-quarter and year-end results, which broke out as follows: Allergan closed the quarter ended December 31 with $1.5 billion in sales, a 7.4% increase over the same period in 2011. Quarterly increases included an 8.2% bump in specialty pharmaceutical sales and an almost 3% rise in medical-device sales compared to the same year-before period. The drug maker exited 2012 with $5.8 billion in sales for the year, a 6.8% increase over 2011. Therapeutic sales accounted for more than half of the company's Botox revenues, which were up 11% compared to the year before, while sales for aesthetic Botox uses rose 8% compared to the year before.
Amgen is laying off 160 of its US staff, reported the Ventura County Star. Spokesperson Kristen Davis confirmed to MM&M that about half of the layoffs will be at its Thousand Oaks campus and that the swept positions will include “corporate and support functions.” Davis did not share if this meant sales and marketing staff were among those being cut, or the brands with which the laid-off employees were affiliated.
Wiley and the nonprofit Cochrane Collaboration have renewed their decade-old partnership for publication of the Cochrane Library's reviews of healthcare and policy. The refreshed agreement includes a provision that will make all systematic reviews published as of February 2013 available through an open-access channel for a year after publication in the Cochrane Library.Baby Boomers are bringing us down, according to a research letter JAMA Internal Medicine published Monday. The researchers found that the health of Baby Boomers ranks lower than that of Tom Brokaw's Greatest Generation. Among their findings: 13.2% of polled Boomers said they were in “excellent health” compared to 32% of the previous generation. This could be easy to brush off as a stoicism on the elders' behalf, but for a few other findings, such as a 38.7% rate of obesity among Boomers, as opposed to 29.4% among the War Generation, a less active lifestyle (35% of Boomers said they exercise regularly vs. 49.9% of the previous generation) and a higher percentage of Boomers suffering from hypertension (43% vs. 36.4%). But the Woodstock Generation did score lower on a few counts, such as lower percentage of smokers, and lesser percentage of emphysema cases. They are also less likely to suffer from heart attacks than their elders.