Pfizer

  Pfizer and Teva are the largest branded and generic pharmaceutical companies, respectively, as measured by revenue and both reported lower quarterly profits Thursday. The results are connected, due to patent litigation between the companies. Pfizer Inc. is headquartered in New York and has facilities around Philadelphia. Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. is based in Israel but has its Americas headquarters in North Wales. Teva swung from a $916 million profit to a $79 million loss in the quarter ending Sept.

WASHINGTON - Pfizer has agreed to pay the federal government $60 million to settle allegations that its employees bribed doctors and other officials in Europe and Asia to win business and boost sales. The Securities and Exchange Commission said Tuesday that Pfizer's overseas subsidiaries made illegal payments to health-care workers in China, Italy, Russia, Croatia and other Eastern European countries. As early as 2001, Pfizer sales representatives tried to conceal the bribes by recording them as legitimate business expenses for travel, entertainment and marketing, the agency said.

Prescription painkillers have surpassed cocaine and heroin as the leading cause of death in drug overdoses, which is why the Food and Drug Administration said Monday that pharmaceutical companies must finance educational programs for doctors in hopes that greater knowledge will help curb the abuse. The opioid painkillers, also known as narcotic or opioid analgesics, are a class of drugs that includes oxycodone, methadone and hydrocodone. More than 20 drugs companies make them, including Endo Health Solutions Inc., Pfizer, Inc. and Janssen Pharmaceuticals Inc., which have operations around Philadelphia.

In a society that keeps score, the U.S. record for the largest financial penalty paid by a pharmaceutical company for illegal marketing of drugs is the $2.3 billion mark set by Pfizer and its subsidiaries in 2009. The Pfizer record might not hold for long. GlaxoSmithKline said last year in a regulatory filing that it reached a deal with the Justice Department to pay $3 billion over allegations about the marketing of several drugs, including Avandia. But the Justice Department has not commented, so the deal is not done.

Pfizer Inc. said Thursday that it would spin off its animal health unit and call the stand-alone company Zoetis. However, Pfizer will maintain control, so it was unclear how independent the new entity will be or how the differentiation will help Pfizer overall. Pfizer is based in Manhattan and has a big human pharmaceutical operation in Collegeville. The animal health unit has about 9,000 employees, with slightly more than 100 of them in Exton. Pfizer is preparing to file paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a potential stock offering in Zoetis, though the shares would represent a minority stake in the new company.

Officials from Pfizer Inc., whose blockbuster cholesterol drug Lipitor faces increased generic competition this month, told the Wall Street Journal Wednesday that the company would discontinue many of the unusual promotional programs it conducted in the last six months to retain revenue from the drug. Pfizer, which lost exclusivity on Lipitor in late November, had offered $4 coupons and struck deals with some health plans, which the Journal reported cost the company more than $87 million.

Pfizer is intent on shedding noncore businesses. AstraZeneca is intent on adding any small company that might bring revenue. Such were underlying motivations for billion-dollar deals announced Monday by the two pharmaceutical giants, both of which have operations in the Philadelphia region. Pfizer Inc. sold its infant nutrition division to Nestle SA for $11.85 billion while AstraZeneca P.L.C. spent $1.26 billion to buy San Diego-based Ardea Biosciences Inc., which has a promising, but not-yet-ready, medicine for gout.

In the Region Pfizer sues Johnson over heat patch Pfizer Inc. has sued a unit of Johnson & Johnson, contending it infringes on a U.S. patent for pain-relieving heat-patch technology. Pfizer, with operations in the Philadelphia region, seeks unspecified damages after a jury trial and a halt to sales of McNeil-PPC's Precise brand patch, according to a complaint filed in federal court in Delaware. McNeil has facilities in Fort Washington. "McNeil was aware of the patent" because its number "is clearly marked on the packaging of Thermacare, Pfizer's competing product," Pfizer lawyers allege.

INDIANAPOLIS - Birth-control pills are known to be nearly 100 percent effective when taken properly, but a recall of the drugs could send a shudder through women of childbearing age. A manufacturing mix-up by Pfizer Inc., the world's largest drugmaker, led to some packets being distributed with the pills out of order. That means a patient could have unknowingly skipped a dose and raised her risk of an accidental pregnancy. Pfizer has recalled about one million packets of Lo/Ovral-28 and its generic equivalent, but the company estimates that only 30 packets were flawed.

Pfizer, the world's largest pharmaceutical company, reported Tuesday that its profit fell 50 percent in the last quarter of 2011, partly because of declining revenue from the cholesterol drug Lipitor. The company's situation for all of last year - nearly flat revenue, a declining workforce, but a 21 percent profit increase - points to the tumultuous changes in the industry, globally and locally. One of the "key takeaways" in the slide presentation that Pfizer promoted to Wall Street analysts was that the company "achieved total cost reduction targets associated with the Wyeth acquisition one year ahead of schedule.