Two of world's biggest drug makers combine AIDS divisions into one company focusing on the disease

From The New York Times:

Two of the world’s biggest drug makers last week spun off their divisions that manufacture AIDS drugs and combined them into one company focusing on the disease.

The new company, ViiV Healthcare, will initially be 85 percent controlled by GlaxoSmithKline and 15 percent controlled by Pfizer. With headquarters in London, the company initially has a portfolio of 10 licensed drugs, including some of the earliest, like AZT and lamivudine, and later ones, like maraviroc, with combined sales of about $2.7 billion in 2008. It also has seven drugs in the pipeline.

The companies say they will try to develop new drugs and new formulations of existing ones, like combination doses for children. ViiV Healthcare will also seek partnerships with other companies to develop multidrug cocktails.

Some in the field were pleased. Dr. Jorge Bermudez, executive secretary of Unitaid, an agency based in Geneva that buys AIDS drugs for the poor, quickly invited ViiV to join its “patent pool” holding licenses on medicines so they can be made generically.

But Mark Harrington, executive director of the Treatment Action Group and a longtime AIDS activist, was skeptical. Mr. Harrington said he worried that separating AIDS work from the larger companies could result, for example, in too little money for a big clinical trial. And the mergers of the last decade meant fewer scientists assigned to AIDS research.

“We’d love to be proved wrong,” he said, “but we’re worried that fewer companies in the field could mean innovation is slowed down.”