Tag • #astrazeneca

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The danger in saying yes to Pascal Soriot’s pay rise at AstraZeneca | Nils Prately

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Thursday, 11 April - 18:12

Despite rebellion, approval of £18.7m package opens door to likelihood of US-style executive pay elsewhere

Is Pascal Soriot, the chief executive of AstraZeneca, “massively underpaid”, as the chief investment officer of Florida-based GQG Partners, one of the company’s big shareholders, argued this week? Well, of course he’s not. Soriot has been paid £120m over the past decade, which is a helluva sum even for someone who has been brilliantly successful in leading what is now – but wasn’t when he arrived – the UK’s second-largest listed company.

The history-turning moment in 2014, when AZ and Soriot managed to see off a bid from Pfizer’s grim number-crunchers, has probably been worth many multiples of £120m to the UK economy. But such a sum for a single employee in an organisation of 90,000 still looks absurd: Soriot doesn’t do all the work himself.

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AstraZeneca promises dividend rise hours before vote on boss’s £19m pay deal

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Thursday, 11 April - 08:02

Drugmaker announces 7% increase as it seeks to garner support for Pascal Soriot’s £1.8m pay boost

Shareholders at AstraZeneca are in line for a 7% increase in dividends this year as the pharmaceutical company attempts to garner support for a pay deal worth up to £19m for its boss, Pascal Soriot.

AstraZeneca said it intended to increase the annual dividend for 2024 by $0.20 to $3.10 a share, reflecting its confidence in its performance and cash generation.

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AstraZeneca to buy Canadian cancer specialist Fusion for $2.4bn

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Tuesday, 19 March - 11:55

Britain’s biggest drugmaker’s latest acquisition will help it to develop new radiotherapy treatments

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Britain’s biggest drugmaker, AstraZeneca, is to buy a Canadian cancer specialist focused on next-generation treatments for $2.4bn. (£1.9bn), the latest in a string of acquisitions made to strengthen its portfolio of new medicines.

The Anglo-Swedish company has struck an agreement to acquire Fusion Pharmaceuticals, which is developing next-generation radioconjugates that offer an alternative to chemotherapy and radiotherapy. It has emerged as a new type of cancer treatment in recent years, and delivers a radioactive isotope directly to cancer cells through precise targeting using molecules such as antibodies, peptides or small molecules.

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When £17m isn’t enough: FTSE firms plead to pay bosses millions more

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Sunday, 10 March - 11:00

Confronted by the huge salaries on offer in the US, London boardrooms are lobbying to be allowed to make their own bosses even wealthier

There was a sharp intake of breath last month when the pharmaceuticals group AstraZeneca cemented chief executive Pascal Soriot’s position as the best-paid FTSE 100 boss with a £17m pay package , up from £15.3m a year earlier. The latest award brings to £137m the amount he has earned since joining in 2012.

While it drew the anger of corporate governance experts, Soriot’s generous payout was just a fraction of the sums his counterparts at the biggest US companies take home. Sundar Pichai of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, stands as the highest-earning boss on the US-based S&P 500, with a $226m pay packet in 2022.

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Big Pharma is “coming to the table” on price negotiations as it loses in court

news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 6 March - 18:50

Big Pharma is “coming to the table” on price negotiations as it loses in court

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Bodo Marks )

Federal health officials this week trumpeted progress in negotiating lower Medicare drug prices as big pharmaceutical companies faced another legal loss in their efforts to have the negotiations ruled unconstitutional.

This week, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that it had received the first counteroffers from pharmaceutical makers for all 10 drugs up for price negotiation . The negotiations—a provision in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022—kicked off late last year with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announcing the 10 drugs selected for bargaining. Those 10 drugs have seen significant price hikes over recent years and, combined, cost Medicare $50.5 billion in gross during 2022, with an additional $3.4 billion in out-of-pocket costs for patients. The health department sent its opening pricing offers to drug makers on February 1.

"We are committed to constructive dialogue and are glad the drug companies are coming to the table," HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a statement . "These are good-faith, up front negotiations," he said, which will "keep money in the pockets of millions of Americans instead of Big Pharma."

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GSK boss’s annual pay package jumps 50% to £12.7m

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Friday, 1 March - 14:58

Emma Walmsley’s deal, with a high share bonus payout, makes her one of the highest-paid CEOs in the FTSE 100

The annual pay package of the boss of GlaxoSmithKline, Emma Walmsley, has jumped by 50% to £12.7m, mainly because of a higher share bonus payout reflecting the British drugmaker’s improved performance.

Walmsley’s huge pay rise makes her one of the highest-paid executives in the FTSE 100 index of Britain’s leading shares, a week after it emerged her counterpart at Britain’s biggest pharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca, Pascal Soriot, received a £16.9m pay package last year and is in line for an even higher package, £18.6m, this year.

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AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot’s £17m pay package under fire

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Tuesday, 20 February - 19:54

Governance thinktank asks whether he has earned a hundred times that of many of his employees

AstraZeneca’s chief executive, Pascal Soriot , received a pay package of nearly £17m last year, cementing his position as one of the best-paid FTSE 100 bosses as he drew criticism from corporate governance experts.

Soriot, who has made nearly £120m in the decade since he took the helm at the drugmaker in October 2012 , was paid £16.9m last year, including salary, benefits and bonuses, up from £15.3m the year before, according to AstraZeneca’s annual report.

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Judge tosses Big Pharma suit claiming drug price negotiation is unconstitutional

news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Tuesday, 13 February - 19:38 · 1 minute

Stephen Ubl, president and chief executive officer of Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), speaks during a Bloomberg Live discussion in Washington, DC, on Tuesday, Sept. 19, 2017.

Enlarge / Stephen Ubl, president and chief executive officer of Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), speaks during a Bloomberg Live discussion in Washington, DC, on Tuesday, Sept. 19, 2017. (credit: Getty | Andrew Harrer )

A federal judge in Texas dismissed a lawsuit Monday brought by a heavy-hitting pharmaceutical trade group, which argued that forcing drug makers to negotiate Medicare drug prices is unconstitutional.

The dismissal is a small win for the Biden administration, which is defending the price negotiations on multiple fronts. The lawsuit dismissed Monday is just one of nine from the pharmaceutical industry, all claiming in some way that the price negotiations laid out in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 are unconstitutional. The big pharmaceutical companies suing the government directly over the negotiations include Johnson & Johnson, Bristol Myers Squibb, Novo Nordisk, Merck, and AstraZeneca.

Last month, a federal judge in Delaware heard arguments from AstraZeneca's lawyers, which reportedly went poorly. AstraZeneca argued that Medicare's new power to negotiate drug prices violates the company's rights under the Fifth Amendment's due process clause. The forced negotiations deprive the company of “property rights in their drug products and their patent rights" without due process, AstraZeneca claimed. But Colm Connolly, chief judge of the US District Court of Delaware, was skeptical of how that could be the case, according to a Stat reporter who was present for the hearing . Connolly noted that AstraZeneca doesn't have to sell drugs to Medicare. "You’re free to do what you want," Connolly reportedly said. "You may not make as much money."

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Nasal COVID vaccine blows clinical trial, flinging researchers back to the lab

news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 12 October, 2022 - 17:17 · 1 minute

Enlarge / A man receives an H1N1 nasal flu spray vaccine at an urgent care center on October 16, 2009, in Lake Worth, Florida. (credit: Getty | Joe Raedle )

The nasal version of the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine failed an early-stage clinical trial, dashing hopes for better infection prevention and forcing researchers to re-think the design.

Many experts have hyped the potential of nasal COVID-19 vaccines. They argue that snorting the shots could encrust the nasal mucous membranes with snotty antibodies—namely IgA—and other immune defenses that could blow away SARS-CoV-2 virus particles before they have the chance to cause an infection. Currently, the shots given intramuscularly in arms provide robust systemic immune responses that prevent severe disease and death but spur relatively weak antibody levels on mucous membranes and, relatedly, don't always prevent infection.

Researchers at the University of Oxford hoped to easily adapt their existing COVID-19 vaccine for such an infection-blasting schnoz spritz. The Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine is a viral vector-based design, using a weakened, benign virus to carry the genetic code of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to human cells. The benign virus, in this case, is an adenovirus, a type best known for causing mild cold-like illnesses in humans, though the specific virus used in the vaccine was isolated from chimpanzees. (This vaccine has not been authorized in the US but is used in dozens of countries worldwide.)

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