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Little pharmaceutical innovation occurs in price-control jurisdictions. The United States has always, by a large margin, led the world as a source of new drugs, and that lead has widened as Japan and Germany have imposed price controls over the past few decades. All major international pharmaceutical companies, without exception, have instituted R&D and commercial operations in the U.S. to take advantage of its pricing environment. (Robert J. Easton, 1/22)

Some American politicians—including, it seems, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump—want to reduce the high cost of prescription drugs by imposing government price controls. But there’s a problem: price controls kill. (Dean Clancy, 1/18)

Johnson & Johnson kicked off Big Pharma's earnings/what-will-you-do with-your-tax-cut-proceeds season Monday morning. It managed to disappoint on both fronts. The company met or beat analyst expectations for both fourth-quarter earnings and 2018 guidance. But there were enough areas of concern within the results that shares fell 2 percent Tuesday morning. And J&J's detail-light promise to use its tax windfall to invest more in "innovation" is likely to frustrate as well. (Max Nisen, 1/23)

Last year, Marathon Pharmaceuticals acquired a European muscular dystrophy drug, secured FDA approval, and jacked up the price 60-fold. Now, another biotech appears poised to use the same strategy. What can – or should – be done to stop it? Superficially, this may look like a no-brainer, with a fairly obvious path forward: close the loopholes that allow this to occur, and punish future perpetrators. But although many drug pricing scandals get lumped together in the lay press, this particular example shows that the differences between them are important if we want to develop effective policies to improve drug access and affordability. (Frank David, 1/21)

H.P. Lovecraft’s aphorism, “From even the greatest of horrors, irony is seldom absent,” applies to the full-page advertising campaign that pharmaceutical giant Purdue Pharma ran in many of the nation’s major newspapers late last year. Purdue manufactures the popular and long-acting opioid OxyContin, on which many patients rely for relief from chronic and severe pain. In the 1990s, numerous clinical studies showed patients were needlessly suffering because drug laws and social stigma discouraged physicians from treating pain with highly effective opioids like OxyContin. (Jeffrey A. Singer, 1/23)

Last year, Todd Hagopian told us he expected promising biotechs to be acquired by pharmaceutical companies with expiring patents and empty pipelines. By investing in the right biotech companies before they became acquisition targets, Todd’s HIBEV fund returned more than 30% last year. On Monday, Sanofi and Celgene announced multibillion-dollar biotech acquisitions showing that this investment strategy continues to have legs. (Ken Kam, 1/23)

Celgene Corp.'s $9 billion purchase of Juno Therapeutics Inc. might have Bluebird Bio Inc. feeling like a third wheel. The deal announced on Monday means Bluebird -- which, like Juno, is working on so-called cell therapies that train human immune cells to hunt cancer -- likely loses its most obvious potential deal suitor. And Celgene has since 2016 been licensing a Bluebird treatment for multiple myeloma. Juno has a similar research program, and now Celgene has a rather awkward overlap. (Max Nisen, 1/22)

It's BioMerger Monday! Celgene Corp.'s $9 billion buyout of Juno Therapeutics Inc. and Sanofi's $11.6 billion deal for Bioverativ Inc. made Monday one of the most exciting biotech deal days in recent memory. But both firms may have let external pressure drive them into iffy deals. (Max Nisen, 1/22)

The health care sector rallied yesterday on another “Merger Monday” with the announcement of Sanofi’s (SNY) purchase of Bioverativ (BIVV) for $11.6 billion, and Celgene’s (CELG) $9 billion purchase of 90 percent of Juno Therapeutics (JUNO). But there’s still one transformative merger that will define and reshape the U.S. health care market in 2018: the CVS/AETNA $69 billion deal announced last December. CVS is best known for its 9,700 retail pharmacies and 1,100 walk-in clinics, but its most significant profit driver is its pharmacy benefits manager (PBM) enterprise—a middleman between pharmaceutical manufacturers and dispensers like drugstores. The company generated $177.5 billion in net revenue in 2016. (Leah Binder, 1/23)