PhillyDeals: Glaxo backs down on new use for prostate drug

In the latest blow to drugmakers' efforts to find new uses for old drugs, GlaxoSmithKline P.L.C. said Wednesday that it would stop asking for U.S. approval to sell its enlarged-prostate treatment drug Avodart as a preventive for common prostate cancer.

Glaxo also is retracting its claims that Avodart can be used for prostate-tumor reduction.

The company cited the "ongoing medical and scientific debate around the benefits and risks." A clinical study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found patients who had used the drug against tumors developed dangerous forms of prostate cancer within four years in 1 percent of the cases tested - double the usual rate.

Urologists differed on whether those cancers were more likely caused by Avodart or were detected years earlier than usual, thanks to increased monitoring of the men under study.

But in January, the Food and Drug Administration's cancer-drug advisory committee told Glaxo that it would not support the drug as an anticancer treatment, given the risk. A European regulator reached similar conclusions, Glaxo said.

The FDA also declined to endorse Merck's rival enlarged-prostate drug Proscar as a cancer fighter.

The agency's refusals show that, after a string of lethal embarrassments, it is trying a little harder to review expanded drug uses, said Daniel R. Hoffman, president of Glenmoore-based Pharmaceutical Business Research Associates and a contributor to Philly.com's Check Up blog.

"The industry has to do a better job of post-approval monitoring. They have to look at longer-range and wider implications" of drug use, Hoffman said.

Despite its failure to win approval as a cancer fighter, Glaxo said Avodart's benefits - easing painful urination and other symptoms of enlarged prostate - still outweighed the risks for that use. The company sold $523 million worth of Avodart last year, said spokeswoman Bernadette King.

Teleflex Inc., the Limerick-based industrial conglomerate, said it has sold its $200 million- yearly-sales Marine Division, which makes throttles and engine assemblies for pleasure boats, to Miami-based buyout firm HIG Capital, for $101.6 million in cash.

HIG also will assume $15.5 million in business liabilities and a $4.5 million Teleflex note.

Four Teleflex plants, including a facility that employs 200 in Limerick and others in Vancouver, Singapore, and Illinois, will be taken over by HIG, said Teleflex spokesman Jake Elguicze.

HIG bought another local company, Pennsauken-based aluminum fabricator Shapes/Arch Holdings L.L.C., in a 2008 bankruptcy sale. In that instance, HIG promised no layoffs, but eventually cut scores of positions as orders fell.

HIG officials did not return phone calls Wednesday.

The move underlines Teleflex's recent focus on medical devices as it dumps old industrial-product lines. The company's yearly sales will total about $1.4 billion after the Marine deal.

New CEO Benson F. Smith, former boss of medical-device maker C.R. Bard, is concentrating Teleflex's energies on that industry after replacing second-generation CEO Jeffrey Black, who "resigned by mutual agreement" with Smith and other directors in January, the company said at the time.

Tenants "are moving out of New Jersey and into Pennsylvania to get more for their money," Englewood Cliffs investor Meyer Orbach told me.

That's why his Orbach Group has bought the 192-unit Hamilton Court East apartments, Bensalem, for $15.5 million, from members of the Undi family. Newly renovated one- and two-bedroom apartments in the 15-building complex rent from about $800 to $1,100 a month, about 30 percent less than similar units would cost in central New Jersey, Orbach said.

He's looking for additional Philadelphia-area buildings and portfolios since Phoenix Realty Group's recent investment in his New York properties freed up capital. It's a good time to buy, he added: "Prices have come down a little bit, and rates are low." New York Community Bank financed the Hamilton deal.

Orbach also owns The Roosevelt at 2220 Walnut St., near Rittenhouse Square; Apartments at Newpointe near Warrington, formerly owned by the Barness family; and other Philadelphia, Lehigh Valley, and New York area buildings, with 3,500 apartments in all.