The market may be closed for the weekend, but market-moving news continues. The Yahoo (YHOO) board of directors, under investor pressure, could put core operations up for sale, or go ahead with CEO Marissa Mayer’s plan to spin off the company’s lucrative Alibaba (BABA) stake. Meanwhile, a slew of blood cancer drug data from Novartis (NVS), Bluebird Bio (BLUE), AbbVie (ABBV) and several others will be presented at the key ASH conference.
Prices for prescription skin drugs to treat everything from acne to skin cancer are skyrocketing, a report out Wednesday found, adding to the public debate about how much drugmakers ought to charge. A study published in JAMA Dermatology said that a survey of 19 brand-name prescription drugs, including those from Valeant Pharmaceuticals (VRX), GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and Novartis (NVS), found their prices jumped 401% on average between 2009 and 2015.
Big-cap biotech Biogen (BIIB) said Wednesday that it had licensed a drug candidate from Japan’s Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma for treating multiple sclerosis and other autoimmune diseases, sending Biogen stock rising. The candidate, MT-1303, is an oral S1P modulator, similar to Novartis’ (NVS) MS drug Gilenya and RPC-1063, the late-stage drug candidate that Celgene (CELG) just acquired with its buyout of Receptos. Data from the phase two trial in