Here are few brief news related to healthcare & pharmaceutical scenes for your update.

• Roche to acquire all outstanding shares of Genentech
Roche has proposed to acquire the outstanding publicly held interest in Genentech for $89 per share in cash, or a total payment of approximately $43.7 billion to equity holders of Genentech other than Roche.  
 
Roche acquired a majority in Genentech in 1990 and currently owns 55.9% of all outstanding shares. The transaction will over time significantly enhance cooperation and cross fertilization among all research hubs inside and outside of the combined company. The separate research and early development unit in South San Francisco led by Genentech will be given the operational freedom to maintain a high level of creativity and independent decision making.
 
Genentech will also have access to the full strength of Roche's worldwide development organization, thus significantly enhancing its ability to leverage international clinical trials and expertise. Roche's Pharma commercial operations in the US will be moved from Nutley to Genentech's site in South San Francisco.
 
The combined company's US commercial operations in pharmaceuticals will reflect the Genentech name, leveraging the strong brand value of Genentech in the US market. The existing US sales organizations of both companies will be maintained, resulting in a very strong presence in several specialty areas.
 
Roche expects the combination to generate annual pre-tax cost synergies of approximately $750 to $850 million. Savings resulting from this combination is expected to enable the new company to increase and better focus its investment in innovation.

• Lots of Sex May Prevent Erectile Dysfunction

A Finnish research led by Dr. Juha Koskimaki, from Tampere University Hospital's Department of Urology has reported that frequent sexual intercourse may cut down on a man's chances of developing erectile dysfunction. The report was published in the July issue of The American Journal of Medicine.

 In the study, researchers collected data on 989 Finnish men aged 55 to 75 years old. The researchers found that men who said they had sexual intercourse less than once a week had twice the risk of developing erectile dysfunction, compared with men reporting having sexual intercourse once a week.

Among men who had sexual intercourse less than once a week, there were 79 cases of erectile dysfunction per 1,000 men. That number dropped to 32 cases per 1,000 among men who said they had sexual intercourse once a week, and it dropped even further, to 16 per 1,000, among men who said they had sexual intercourse three or more times a week, the researchers reported.

The frequency of morning erections was not associated with the incidence of moderate erectile dysfunction, the researchers noted.

However, the development of complete erectile dysfunction could be predicted from the frequency of morning erections. Among men with less than one morning erection a week, the risk of developing erectile dysfunction was 2.5-fold greater than among men who had two to three morning erections per week.

?  Many kids carry the superbug MRSA: study

Many children may be carrying the drug-resistant "superbug" MRSA in their nasal passages, unbeknownst to anyone, research suggests. Investigators at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, report that MRSA "is widespread among children in our community."
 
Dr. Stephanie A. Fritz and colleagues obtained nasal swabs from 1,300 patients from 11 practices in the St. Louis area. The prevalence of MRSA, which stands for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, varied from 0 percent to 9 percent (the average was 2.6 percent), depending on the practice.

The estimated prevalence of MRSA among children in the two-county St. Louis area was 2.4 percent, Fritz and colleagues report in the journal Pediatrics.

They found that 28 percent of the MRSA isolates were types often seen in healthcare settings and 66 percent were the types often seen in the community.

A significantly greater number of children found to have "community-acquired" MRSA were black and were enrolled in Medicaid, in comparison with children carrying healthcare-associated MRSA strains, the investigators report.

Fritz and colleagues say they are currently monitoring children identified as being exposed to MRSA and noting their progress to infection.

SOURCE: Pediatrics, June 2008.

•  Eli Lilly, Merck & Pfizer  to Forge Technical Collaboration on New Discovery

Three of the biggest pharma companies on the planet are joining forces to back an unusual venture aimed at developing "breakthrough" discovery technology that can reduce the frequency of trial failures and save them huge amounts of money. Eli Lilly, Merck and Pfizer--which often compete on new therapies--are joining forces with PureTech Ventures to provide $39 million to finance the launch of Enlight Biosciences. Enlight in turn plans to spin off new companies if the technology looks promising enough. Some of the new technologies the collaboration will explore include finding ways to deliver drugs across the blood-brain barrier and new biomarkers.

"Today, drug discovery is tremendously tech-dependent, and many of the pharmaceutical companies are falling behind," Enlight co-founder Raju Kucherlapati, a genetics professor at Harvard Medical School, told the Wall Street Journal.

"The biopharmaceutical industry has a great need for innovative enabling technologies that will catalyze fundamental transformation of the drug discovery and development process. A collaborative entrepreneurial initiative such as Enlight that is dedicated to such technological innovation in R&D meets that need in an ideal way. We are excited about our partnership with Enlight and its team of world-renowned scientists," said Dr. Steven Paul, the executive vice president, science and technology, at Eli Lilly.

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