Out of Thailand

As tension mounts over drug-pricing policy, pharmaceutical company Abbott says it will not be launching seven new drugs in Thailand, including treatments for HIV and bacterial infections. The move follows the country's decision to issue 'compulsory licences' that allow it to make or import cheap versions of several patented drugs. One of these is Kaletra, an anti-HIV drug from Abbott. The company says it decided to withhold the new drugs on the grounds that it can no longer defend its patents in Thailand.

Scot free

Charges brought against senior managers of computer company Hewlett-Packard for spying on their own employees and board members have been dropped. In a 14 March settlement at the Santa Clara Country Superior Court between the judge and the California state prosecutors, all charges against Patricia Dunn, the former company chairman who had to resign last year over the scandal, were dismissed, and charges against the other four defendants have been reduced to misdemeanours. The charges rocked Hewlett-Packard after Dunn and her colleagues launched a no-holds-barred investigation into the leaking of details of company board meetings to the media.

Illumination delayed

Attendees at the American College of Cardiology meeting in New Orleans next week won't see the much-anticipated results of the study that forced Pfizer to pull the plug on its next-generation cholesterol drug torcetrapib (see Nature 445, 13; 2007), the company says. The detailed results were to have been released at the meeting, but are taking longer to analyse than expected. Before the 15,000-subject trial was stopped last December, deaths among patients taking torcetrapib were significantly higher than among those who were not taking the drug.