While You Were Getting Rained Out in Atlanta

Having a day to kill in Atlanta it made perfect sense to sit in the sun and root against the Braves, but of course mother nature had other plans. After a two hour rain delay the game was postponed; at least they put the Phillies on the jumbotron for a while. If you didn't fly in early to get the saturday night stay fare, while you were in-transit ...

• Amy Harmon writes in the New York Times about the long and arduous path to get a drug, Iplex from Insmed, approved for use in a compassionate use program to treat a patient with ALS.
  
• Where's the love? Onyx suing sorafenib (Nexavar) partner Bayer for rights to a Phase II compound, fluoro-sorafenib, which it claims Onyx should jointly own. In a release Onyx says, "Onyx was recently advised that the compound, fluoro-sorafenib, is a variant of Nexavar® (sorafenib) tablets and has the same chemical structure as Nexavar, except that a single fluorine atom has been substituted for a hydrogen atom. The new molecule had been identified in 1998 during the research collaboration period by the companies' joint research teams. Discussions with Bayer regarding Onyx's rights to fluoro-sorafenib under the companies' 1994 collaboration agreement were not productive."
• From The Pink Sheet ($): More on Lilly's Lechleiter and pharma's "innovation crisis."
  
• There are a few of us IVBers down here in Atlanta (btw: New Atlanta nicknames: may we suggest Coldlanta or Rainlanta?) and we're going to try to entertain and enlighten you with some blogging and tweeting over the next few days. Of course we've got some stuff to do for the magazines that aren't, you know, free, so check out Pink as well.
• Takeda this morning bought IDM Pharma for $75 million, or $2.64 per share (a 55% premium). IDM recently received approval in Europe for a drug to treat osteosarcoma. Check out the story from Reuters.
  
• Oxford BioTherapeutics and GSK have entered an option/alliance deal around antibodies for certain undisclosed cancer targets. Interestingly the deal goes both ways: GSK is developing mAbs around selected OBT targets, and GSK has an option to one of OBT's ongoing programs.
• In other cancer antibody news, Daiichi Sankyo has exercised its option under an existing deal to start two additional programs with Morphosys, bringing the total programs in the deal to four.