Transactions involving Biocon/Zentiva, CrystalGenomics/PanGen, Umoja/IASO, Marinus/Tenacia, Ono/Captor and Daewoong/HitGen plus deals in brief.

The Greek government is pushing forth with negative and positive drug lists as a way to cut public pharmaceutical expenditure from about €4.3 billion for 2010 to €3.4 billion in 2011. Public pharma expenditure has fallen already significantly from the €5.1 billion in 2009, where €850 million worth of savings were made in 2010, of which €500 million were the result of drug price cuts.

The US FDAis requiring 16 manufacturers of 24 branded and generic opioid medicines to jointly develop a classwide risk evaluation and mitigation strategy (REMS) to reduce deaths and serious injuries resulting from misuse, abuse and overdose.

Teva Pharmaceutical Industrieshas received US FDA approval and started shipping its fentanyl transdermal patches, in 25, 50, 75 and 100 μg/hour doses, AB-rated generic versions of Ortho-McNeil's (J&J) Duragesic. Generic fentanyl patches are already available in the US from other companies, including Mylan, Watson, Lavipharm and Actavis. Earlier this year, lots of Watson's and Actavis's versions were separately adversely affected by manufacturing issues. Teva's version is manufactured by Aveva Drug Delivery Systems, a division of Nitto Denko, which Teva describes as one of the world's largest manufacturers of, and pioneer in, drug-in-adhesive transdermal patch technology.