No more Mr Nice Guy: Glax­o­SmithK­line is com­ing out of its cor­ner swing­ing

Glax­o­SmithK­line CEO Em­ma Walm­s­ley sig­naled this week that the com­pa­ny is go­ing to fight for every scrap on the com­mer­cial ta­ble while push­ing a turn­around on the pipeline. And she just picked up an un­earned score af­ter a ma­jor threat to their Ad­vair fran­chise ran in­to a se­ri­ous de­lay.

The big stum­ble oc­curred at No­var­tis’ big gener­ics op­er­a­tion San­doz, which spread the word Thurs­day that the FDA had re­ject­ed its gener­ic ver­sion of GSK’s Ad­vair, a block­buster prod­uct that is al­ready fac­ing cheap­er gener­ic com­pe­ti­tion in Eu­rope. And the com­plete re­sponse let­ter will like­ly stall any mar­ket en­try be­yond the end of this year.

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