While You Were Waiting for the Polls to Close

Welcome back to your workaday life, readers, and Happy New Year. As we look ahead to 2009 lets not forget to wrap up those loose ends from 2008--a year that saw, global financial meltdown, the Phillies win the World Series, an exciting US presidential election, and, of course, IN VIVO Blog's first Deals of the Year competition. You have one more day to vote! We'll announce the winner tomorrow.

With nearly 1200 votes cast so far, Alnylam's RNAi deal with Takeda remains comfortably ahead with 38%. Other deals in double-digits are Vertex's sale of the royalty stream from its HIV protease inhibitors (13%), Genzyme's mipomersen deal with Isis (13%), and Takeda's acquisition of Millennium (21%). But where's the love for Infinity/Purdue? Where's the respect for FDA's forced label changes to Aranesp? Where are our partisan readers from Pfizer, GSK, Novartis, Lilly, or Congress for that matter?

If we hadn't already dragged this thing out milked this thing for two weeks set down the rules in stone, we'd be tempted to do a run-off between the top two or three deals. But there will be no run off, folks. The clock is ticking.

Welcome back to work everyone. First order of business? Get thee to the ballot box.