Bristol Myers CEO sees mid-decade transition, late decade growth

 Bristol Myers Squibb's new chief executive said on Friday that the company was focused on driving growth toward the end of the decade but would first need to weather a difficult transition period beginning in 2026.

Bristol shares were up about half a percent in early trading.

Chris Boerner took over as CEO in November right after the company pared back expectations for its existing new product portfolio.

The company is expecting its top selling drugs, blood thinner Eliquis and cancer immunotherapy Opdivo, to lose patent protection later this decade. It announced a string of deals intended to restock its drug development pipeline late last year.

"As we think about this decade, we see three distinct periods: a near term growth period, a transition period, and potential for sustainable top-tier growth, which we plan to drive in the back end of the decade," Boerner said on a conference call to discuss the company's fourth-quarter results.

The company announced profit and revenue that beat Wall Street expectations on strength of aging blood cancer drug Revlimid and its new anemia treatment Reblozyl.

"Starting around 2026, our exposure is most acute, and our focus will be on shortening the transition period as much as possible by accelerating our R&D programs and executing on product approvals and launches while maintaining P&L (profit and loss) discipline," he said.

Boerner said the company expects to deliver "top-tier sustainable growth" beginning around 2028.

Analysts, on average, are looking for revenue growth in 2024 and 2025, but expect it to decline in 2026.

Bristol Myers has already faced pressure from generic competition for Revlimid, once its top-selling drug. Current top seller Eliquis, which it shares with Pfizer, is expected to have revenue curtailed when the U.S. institutes negotiated drug prices for its Medicare program in 2026.

Opdivo could also face biosimilar competition toward the end of the decade.

The company reported revenue of $11.48 billion in the fourth quarter. Analysts on average had expected $11.19 billion, according to LSEG data.

Bristol Myers said it earned $3.5 billion, or $1.70 a share, in the quarter, excluding certain one-time items, topping analysts' expectations by 17 cents a share.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bristol-myers-posts-better-expected-120434539.html

Doctor who prescribed more than 500,000 opioid doses has conviction tossed

 A Virginia doctor who prescribed more than 500,000 opioid doses in less than two years had his conviction and 40-year prison sentence thrown out by a federal appeals court on Friday, because the jury instructions misstated the law.

The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia also ordered a new trial for Joel Smithers, 41, who has been serving his sentence in an Atlanta prison.

Overprescription of painkillers is one of the main causes of the nation's opioid crisis. Nearly 645,000 people died in the United States from overdoses involving opioids from 1999 to 2021, including 80,411 in 2021 alone, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Prosecutors said Smithers prescribed controlled substances including fentanyl, hydromorphone, oxycodone and oxymorphone to every patient he saw at the Martinsville, Virginia office he opened in August 2015.

A majority of patients traveled hundreds of miles each way to see Smithers, who did not accept insurance and collected more than $700,000 in cash and credit card payments before law enforcement raided his office in March 2017, prosecutors said.

Jurors convicted Smithers on 861 counts in May 2019, after being instructed that the government needed to prove he acted "without a legitimate medical purpose or beyond the bounds of medical practice."

The appeals court found this instruction defective in light of a 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision that said the crime of prescribing controlled substances required a defendant to "knowingly or intentionally" act in an unauthorized manner.

Writing for a three-judge panel, Circuit Judge Roger Gregory said Smithers' jury instructions were defective because jurors could have convicted him solely for acting outside the bounds of medical practice, regardless of his knowledge or intent.

He also said such an error was not harmless, even in cases with "copious evidence of a defendant's guilt."

The office of U.S. Attorney Christopher Kavanaugh in the Western District of Virginia did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

"A doctor's guilt depends purely on his subjective beliefs," said Beau Brindley, a lawyer for Smithers. "Any attempt by the government to pretend otherwise was resoundingly rejected."

The case is U.S. v. Smithers, 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 19-4761.

https://news.yahoo.com/doctor-prescribed-more-500-000-181108724.html