No withdrawal

An advisory panel to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has said that the diabetes drug Avandia (rosiglitazone) raises the risk of heart attack, but recommended against pulling it from the market, on a vote of 22 to 1. The drug, which generated £1.6 billion (US$3.1 billion) in sales last year for London-based GlaxoSmithKline, has come under scrutiny since a meta-analysis published by the New England Journal of Medicine found that it boosted heart attacks risk by 43% (see Nature 447, 512–513; 2007). The FDA usually follows the advice of its external advisers: in this case, however, its senior staff are said to be divided on how best to proceed.

Physics buy-out

The Japanese company Sumitomo Chemical has said it will buy British materials developer Cambridge Display Technology for US$285 million. The Cambridge-based company, founded in 1992 by physicist Richard Friend and his colleagues, specializes in developing polymers for use in light-emitting diodes. The offer valued the company's shares at $12 — almost twice their closing price on 30 July, the day before the deal was announced. The size of the premium has been encouraging to other small companies in the nanotechnology industry (see below).

Time to lay-off

Disappointing quarterly results have led to a clutch of lay-off announcements by major drug companies. Britain's AstraZeneca has said that it will reduce its workforce by 11%, or 7,600 people, and Johnson & Johnson of New Jersey has said its staff numbers will fall by more than 4,000. Bristol-Myers Squibb, based in New York, has also said it will cut an unspecified number of positions. The reductions come on top of similar announcements by Merck and Pfizer earlier in the year, and reflect industry-wide concerns about prospects for profitability and for developing new, best-selling drugs.