Drug draw

European regulators are approving new drugs just as quickly, on average, as the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), according to an assessment by the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development in Boston, Massachusetts. Tufts analysed the period from 2000 to 2005 and found that of 71 new drugs approved by both the European Medicines Agency and the FDA, the average times to approval were 15.8 months and 15.7 months, respectively. The FDA approved most of the products — 47 of them — more quickly than the European regulator, but its approval times were much more variable.

Wood recycling

A Japanese company will next month start operations of a ¥4-billion (US$33-million) facility to produce ethanol from scrap timber. The plant will consume up to 50,000 tonnes of timber in its first year, generating about 2 megawatts of electricity and 1,400 tonnes of bioethanol for use as an additive to petrol. It has been built by Bio Ethanol Japan Kansai in Osaka, based partly on technology developed by Celunol in Massachusetts. Corn and sugar cane have traditionally been the main feedstocks for ethanol plants.

Stalling tactic

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) says that pharmaceutical companies are successfully making use of a new tactic aimed at delaying the introduction of cheaper, generic drugs. The commission told a US Senate committee on 17 January that 14 patent litigation settlements between drug firms and generic companies in the fiscal year ending 30 September included 'pay-for-delay' agreements. In these, a generic competitor is paid by the maker of the patented drug to delay introduction of a copycat drug. The previous year, the FTC had counted three such agreements, and there were none the year before that.