Two of the world's drugmakers are spending this week answering hard questions about how they sell their products.
According to Endpoints News, the European Commission has opened an investigation into whether Sanofi broke EU competition rules in the way it marketed Efluelda, its enhanced flu vaccine aimed at people over 60. Endpoints reports that the French pharmaceutical company is accused of running an alleged "smear campaign" against a rival flu vaccine, and that regulators are examining whether Sanofi used "misleading" tactics in its marketing. Competition probes of this kind can lead to formal charges and fines if regulators conclude a company unfairly disadvantaged a competitor.
Separately, Endpoints News reports that the Chinese biotech Akeso is pushing back against scrutiny of its next-generation lung cancer drug. The questions were raised earlier this month at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), one of the most closely watched gatherings in cancer medicine. In what Endpoints describes as an exclusive interview, Akeso's leadership defended the drug against the doubts aired at the conference.
The two stories are different in nature — one is a formal regulatory inquiry into marketing conduct, the other a scientific and reputational dispute over clinical data — but together they capture a pharmaceutical industry facing pressure from multiple directions at once: antitrust regulators policing how medicines are promoted, and the medical community scrutinizing whether the data behind new treatments holds up.
Why it matters: when regulators question how a vaccine is marketed and oncologists question how a cancer drug performs, the outcomes shape which treatments patients can trust and how fairly competing therapies reach the people who need them.