Merck

Merck & Co. Inc., which made the controversial arthritis painkiller Vioxx, just settled an unusual class-action lawsuit involving Missouri residents who sued on consumer-fraud grounds without having shown that they incurred physical harm. The economic argument was that Vioxx did not provide what Merck claimed it would. Vioxx was on the market from 1999 until it was withdrawn in 2004 because previously hidden clinical trials showed that it caused increased risk of heart attacks. Merck has large operations in the Philadelphia region.

Bradley T. Sheares, the U.S. marketing chief of Merck & Co. Inc., has been replaced in a shake-up of the drugmaker's marketing division, the company said yesterday. Sheares, based in Upper Gwynedd, Montgomery County, was succeeded by Adam Schechter, current general manager of Merck's joint venture with Schering-Plough Corp., said spokesman Raymond Kerins. The shuffle at Merck U.S. Human Health came two months after chief executive Richard Clark installed a new global marketing chief, Peter Loescher, as part of a restructuring prompted largely by the Vioxx recall and litigation.

Merck Inc., with headquarters in Whitehouse Station, N.J., and operations in the Philadelphia suburbs, said Monday that company researchers will collaborate with the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, the University of California-San Francisco and seven other academic institutions to develop new approaches toward eradicating HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, is the primary funding organization, though Merck will not receive any funding for its participation.

Officials for the pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. say there are just barely enough parking spaces for their 4,600 employees now. When the company's planned expansion is finished in 1993, there will be 700 more people working there and they will need a place to park. So Merck went before the Zoning Hearing Board of Upper Gwynedd Township on Tuesday to ask for variances that would allow for the construction of a new lot and the expansion of an old one. "We've always felt that we've been playing catch-up in parking," Joseph J. Salvia, manager of facilities area engineering for Merck, said in an interview after the hearing.

Merck & Co. Inc. presented details yesterday of an ambitious restructuring campaign it hopes will restore its once-vaunted position, including narrowing its research priorities and reducing sales calls on physicians. The New Jersey company, with about a fifth of its global workforce of 63,000 based in the suburbs of Philadelphia, said total cutbacks over the next five years should be worth $4.5 billion to $5 billion - $1 billion more than it first announced last month. It also pledged to reverse its slide in earnings starting in 2007 and hit "double-digit" compounded annual growth in earnings in following years.

Merck & Co. Inc., a Whitehouse Station, N.J., pharmaceutical giant with major operations in Montgomery County, said today that it had agreed to pay $430 million for Inspire Pharmaceuticals Inc. of Raleigh, N.C., which specializes in medicines for eye diseases. Boards of directors for both companies as well as Inspire's largest shareholder, Warburg Pincus Private Equity IX L.P., have approved the deal, which values Inspire at $5 a share, a 26 percent premium over Inspire's Monday close.

The Food and Drug Administration approved the first combination drug to treat type 2 diabetes and high cholesterol in one tablet. Merck & Co. Inc.'s Juvisync combines two previously approved prescription medicines in one tablet for adults who need both sitagliptin and simvastatin. About 20 million Americans have type 2 diabetes and many have high cholesterol.    - David Sell

Merck said it received approval from the European Commission for doctors to prescribe Victrelis (chemical name boceprevir) to patients with hepatitis C. The drug is used with two other drugs to treat adults with liver diseases caused by the virus. An estimated four million people in Europe have hepatitis C. The commission decision allows Merck to market the drug for the specified purpose in 27 European Union countries and European Economic Area members Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway.

Some veteran Merck employees, including those in West Point and Upper Gwynedd, had a decision to make Friday that will affect employment for themselves and colleagues with the global pharmaceutical manufacturer. A union official said Friday was the deadline for filing papers to accept early-retirement packages offered by the company, which recently said it was going to cut 13,000 jobs across the company by 2015. "If they get their number, then maybe not, but if they don't get their number, there might be layoffs," said Dan Bangert, plant chairman of United Steelworkers Union Local 10-00086.

Still suffering from its Vioxx withdrawal, Merck & Co. Inc. said yesterday that profit fell 15 percent in the first quarter this year. Net income declined to $1.37 billion from $1.62 billion. Earnings per share were down 11 cents to 62 cents. Worldwide sales slipped 5 percent to $5.36 billion, from $5.63 billion a year earlier. The news mostly matched expectations on Wall Street, where shares in Merck, based in Whitehouse Station, N.J., with major operations in Montgomery County, closed at $34.28, up 21 cents or 0.62 percent.

Multinational drug companies, like other businesses, see Africa as an emerging market with tremendous opportunities and challenges, and that was a backdrop to Thursday's announcements of two programs designed to deliver more medicine and better health care to the continent. Merck & Co. and GlaxoSmithKline Plc joined the GAVI alliance in announcing from Cape Town, South Africa, an agreement to supply human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine at lower prices to developing countries to help girls and women in those nations avoid cervical cancer.

NEW YORK - A Merck & Co. sales representative is suing the drugmaker for at least $100 million, saying it does not give women equal opportunities for advancement and punishes employees for maternity leave. Kelli Smith, who has worked at Merck since 2004, says in the lawsuit that the company's sales plans create incentives to discriminate against women, that women are discouraged from advancing their careers and are told they have to choose between being mothers and taking bigger roles at the company, and that men get more opportunities to meet senior managers and develop important contacts.

The 2,000 or so union employees and management at the Merck & Co. plant in West Point, Montgomery County, agreed to continue working and negotiating after the union contract expired Tuesday night. Weeks of negotiations and news of weak first-quarter financial results make the prospects for a new agreement and more job cuts - union or otherwise - unclear. On Wednesday, Merck said revenue and profits were down for the first quarter, and it lowered the profit expectations for the rest of 2013.

PRINCETON - Merck & Co.'s chief executive officer, Ken Frazier, says the drugmaker's facility in West Point, Montgomery County, is in no danger of being closed now. Merck is among the many pharmaceutical companies that have announced in recent months plans to close or consolidate facilities in hopes of squeezing more efficiency out of their operations. Some of those decisions involved laying off employees. Is West Point safe? "Yes," Frazier said Thursday evening after speaking about Merck's worldwide vaccine programs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

Novira Therapeutics Inc., of Doylestown, has completed its initial $25 million venture financing, after attracting $7.5 million from Versant Ventures. Founded by two former Merck & Co. Inc. executives, Novira is developing antiviral drugs to treat hepatitis B infections. The addition of Versant, with offices in Basel, Switzerland, and San Francisco, increased the amount of the financing from $23 million, announced last August and led by 5AM Ventures and Canaan Partners.   Contact Mike Armstrong at 215-854-2980 or marmstrong@phillynews.com , or @PhillyInc on Twitter.

Merck & Co. said Friday that a drug designed to help patients coming out of anesthesia after surgery will require three more months of review by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Sugammadex sodium is an injectable drug that reverses the muscle-relaxing effects of anesthesia. If approved, the drug would be the first in a new class of medicine in this country. Merck is based in Whitehouse Station, N.J., but has a big operation in West Point, Montgomery County. The European Medicines Agency approved the drug in 2008 and it is sold in Europe under the name Bridion.

Merck & Co. chief executive officer Kenneth C. Frazier is convinced that nearly everyone, from patients to long-term investors, wants the world's third-largest drugmaker to take big risks. So Merck is plunging ahead in one of medicine's toughest challenges - looking for a drug to slow Alzheimer's disease - despite repeated failures that have led most drugmakers to halt or scale back research on the No. 6 killer in the United States. "When people question me, 'Aren't you putting a lot of money at risk for something that's hard?

Merck & Co. Inc., will pay $8.5 million to settle allegations by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania that the drugmaker inappropriately marketed its controversial painkiller Vioxx, which was withdrawn from the market in 2004. State Attorney General Kathleen G. Kane announced that, after attorneys' fees are paid, $6.9 million will go to the PACE program, which helps low-income seniors buy prescription medicine. Vioxx was first approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1999 but was pulled from the market in 2004 amid reports that it was causing health problems, including heart attacks and strokes.

Merck & Co. said Thursday that it would pay $668 million to settle two class-action lawsuits by investors who accused the company of not properly disclosing the failure of a cholesterol drug to meet its target in a key clinical trial. Merck's announcement followed a disclosure by Teva Pharmaceuticals Ltd. to the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday that after it had already set aside $670 million to cover potential damages in a patent-infringement lawsuit brought by Pfizer Inc., the "ultimate resolution of this matter could result in a loss of up to $1.4 billion" more - a potential total of about $2.1 billion.