AstraZeneca today announced that the Federal Court of Australia has found three patents protecting CRESTOR (rosuvastatin) to be invalid. These patents - a formulation patent (AU 200051842, with an expiry date in 2020); a second related to the use of rosuvastatin for treating heterozygous familial hypercholesterolemia (AU 2002214165, with an expiry date in 2021); and a third related to the use of rosuvastatin for treating hypercholesterolemia (AU 2000023051, with an expiry date in 2020) - were challenged by Apotex Pty Ltd, Watson Pharma Pty Ltd and Ascent Pharma Pty Ltd.

2012 was a very successful year for the Bayer Group. "We continued to grow dynamically and achieved our targets for the Group. All the subgroups posted gains in sales and earnings before special items," said Bayer CEO Dr. Marijn Dekkers at the Financial News Conference in Leverkusen on Thursday.

Novartis today announced that it has launched an effort to eliminate rheumatic heart disease in Zambia in collaboration with the Lusaka University Teaching Hospital (UTH), the Ministry of Health in Zambia, the Pan-African Cardiology Society and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH).

Roche is expanding access to its clinical trial data for third party researchers. Roche will work with an independent body of recognised experts to evaluate and approve requests to access anonymised patient-level data. Roche will support the release of full clinical study reports (CSRs) for all its licensed medicines via regulatory authorities and make available any CSRs that cannot be provided by these authorities upon a researcher’s request.

Bayer HealthCare announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Bayer's Stivarga® (regorafenib) tablets to treat patients with locally advanced, unresectable or metastatic gastrointestinal stromal tumor (GIST) who have been previously treated with imatinib mesylate and sunitinib malate.

Roche (SIX: RO, ROG; OTCQX: RHHBY) announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved Kadcyla (trastuzumab emtansine or T-DM1) for the treatment of people with HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer (mBC) who have received prior treatment with Herceptin (trastuzumab) and a taxane chemotherapy. Kadcyla is the fourth medicine from Roche to receive FDA approval for people with advanced cancers within the past two years.

Abbott (NYSE: ABT) announced that it will collaborate with Janssen Biotech, Inc. and Pharmacyclics, Inc. to explore the benefits of Abbott's proprietary FISH (fluorescence in situ hybridization) technology for use in developing a molecular companion diagnostic test to identify patients with a genetic subtype of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), the most common form of adult leukemia.