IRS tax assessment for 2013, the year Perrigo acquired Dublin-based Elan, adds another cloud to OTC private label giant's outlook as it prepares to present plans for accelerating growth for its long-slumping consumer health business in the US and Europe at a March 9 investor day conference. Perrigo shares dropped more than 9% in early trading after IRS notice became known to investors before inching upward and ending at $47.92, down 6.8% from the previous day's close.

Biogen quickly became the leader in the multiple sclerosis market, growing Avonex into a billion-dollar drug. Now Biogen's dominance is being challenged by Serono and its new partner Pfizer, co-promoting another interferon, Rebif, which came to market with head-to-head data showing it's better. Biogen maintains that Avonex is the best treatment, and is working to support its contention. The biotech is confident that the relationships it has built over time, and strengthened through services, will be hard for newcomers to push aside. The potential for leverage is what attracts Pfizer to this specialist market: it aims to sell Rebif broadly. Its 300 neurology sales reps will carry other products for the co-morbidities MS patients suffer--so the ROI could be good, even if Rebif itself isn't a huge seller. An industry whose pipeline is far richer in niche than GP products will be watching this marketing battle: will Biogen's focus carry the day--or can Pfizer turn a late-entry specialist product into a market leader and in the process, make significant money for itself?

Shire's latest acquisition, of Canada's BioChem Pharma, is its sixth in as many years, and the clearest sign yet of the shift which the UK-based specialty pharmaceutical company has to make towards earlier-stage research in order to keep up its impressive growth. Behind this growth is its low-risk Search & Development strategy: it seeks out promising, undervalued specialist-market drugs which it develops for new indications, or else finds new formulations for, after which it hands them on to its highly focused marketing and sales teams. A series of acquisitions-bolting on products, development programs and skills-has allowed Shire to quickly expand globally and broaden its portfolio. But as drugs get harder to find and more expensive, the company has had to throw its S&D net wider.

Cell Pathways began as the pet project of a man suffering a rare inherited disease causing colon polyps. He'd heard an anti-inflammatory from Merck might help, and when it did, he asked the prescribing physician to research it further. Hopes that Merck would take up the work were dismissed, so the founders decided to develop a metabolite of the original drug on their own. They got some money from angel investors and set to. The small firm came to believe its compound triggered cell death by a novel mechanism-and decided utter secrecy was necessary to protect the discovery. That choice meant Cell Pathways built no scientific credibility and found no partners. A new CEO has attracted some investors, taken the firm public and expanded its focus to cancer treatment. He too sought partners at first, before deciding the company had more to gain by keeping all rights to the product. Cell Pathways' credibility problem--compounded by a Phase III failure early in 1999--could be greatly healed if, as management now hopes, a revised data package convinces FDA to approve Aptosyn after all. The company insists it is not a one-trick pony, and says Aptosyn is in fact the first in a new class of compounds with the power to treat and even prevent some cancers. But before it can argue for a platform, it must prove the product works.