While You Were Homering

There were nine home runs hit at Citizen's Bank Park this weekend--seven by the good guys and three of those courtesy of the man pictured above. The Fightin's took games three and four to take a 3-1 Series lead and game five is tonight at the Bank. One more. Please?

We know you come here for more than just baseball coverage on Monday morning (yes, the Eagles and Flyers also won), and there was plenty of action on the drug development front at both ICAAC and ACR. We'll unpack some of it below, in your weekly roundup of weekend events that happened on the weekend this week that weren't sports-related.

While you were crossing your fingers ...

• The news out of the joint Infectious Disease Society of America/Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy is coming thick and fast. Just a taste: data from Rib-X here, on Merck's Rotateq here and Isentress here, and on Progenics' PRO140 here. The co-conferences run through tomorrow: more infectious disease news than you can shake a stick at, here.
  
• Plenty of arthritis news out of the American College of Rheumatology meeting in SF as well. Wyeth talks up Enbrel's advantages over DMARDs here, Roche's Actemra's positive Phase III data discussed here, and Reuters reviews the outcome of trials of JNJ/S-P's golumumab here. More ACR headlines here.
  
• EyeonFDA points us over to Covalence's quarterly rankings of ethical companies, where GSK leads the way among pharmaceutical companies (while BMS is apparently making the most 'progress'). But with no pharmas cracking the top ten that probably isn't much to crow about. Like winning the NL West.
  
• mmm, beer. mmm mmm, beer that's good for you?
• It wasn't just ICAAC and ACR on the clinical acronym front this weekend. The EAP (European Academy of Pediatrics) got in on the action as well. At EAP, Ikaria Holdings (a quite interesting biotech focused on therapeutic gases--read more here) announced Phase III results from a trial of inhaled nitric oxide for the treatment of bronchopulmonary disease (BPD) in premature babies, though sadly the treatment unexpectedly failed to show any benefit.
• Ben Goldacre's Bad Science column this weekend highlights the work done by ClinPsych blog examining "yet another small print criticism of a trivial act of borderline dubiousness which will ultimately lead to distorted evidence, irrational decisions, and bad outcomes in what I like to call 'the real world'". What's that, exactly? The duplicate publication of positive data on Lilly/Boehringer's duloxetine (Cymbalta). Last week, the drug was turned down in Europe today as a treatment for fibromyalgia.
• Why Can't Us?
  

image from World Series game 4 by flickr user mjkmjk used under a creative commons license.