VENTURE CAPITAL POST

China had more than 18,500 drugs waiting for approval at the end of 2014, up by a third from a year before, the official Center for Drug Evaluation said on Friday, reflecting industry concern that it is getting harder to get medicines approved in the China market.

Werner Baumann, seen as heir apparent to Bayer Chief Executive Marijn Dekkers, says he will fight for the independence of Germany's largest drugmaker after the spin-off of its plastics unit.

Security experts are warning healthcare and insurance companies that 2015 will be the "Year of the Healthcare Hack," as cybercriminals are increasingly attracted to troves of personal information held by U.S. insurers and hospitals that command high prices on the underground market.

Investors are rushing into China's booming healthcare business, helping M&A deal values surpass those of the hot Internet sector, as the country prepares to cater to hundreds of millions of elderly patients.

The Obama administration on Friday proposed a plan to move most doctors, hospitals and their patients to national standards for handling electronic clinical data by the end of 2017.

Johnson & Johnson reported a slightly better-than-expected quarterly profit as surging sales of new drugs and mainstay older brands offset weak demand for medical devices and consumer healthcare products.

The world's biggest drugmakers face a new reality when it comes to U.S. pricing for their products as insurers use aggressive tactics to extract steep price discounts, even for the newest medications.

Of every $10 spent on healthcare in the U.S., almost 90 cents is due to smoking, a new analysis says. Using recent health and medical spending surveys, researchers calculated that 8.7 percent of all healthcare spending, or $170 billion a year, is for illness caused by tobacco smoke, and public programs like Medicare and Medicaid paid for most of these costs.

Security researchers say they have uncovered a cyber espionage ring focused on stealing corporate secrets for the purpose of gaming the stock market, in an operation that has compromised sensitive data about dozens of publicly held companies.

Leading U.S. CEOs, angered by the Obama administration's challenge to certain "workplace wellness" programs, are threatening to side with anti-Obamacare forces unless the government backs off, according to people familiar with the matter.

Britain's biggest drugmaker, GlaxoSmithKline Plc, fired an executive from its South African unit for refusing to appear for a performance review, which was called a week after he complained of racial discrimination in the workplace, Bloomberg reported, citing company documents.

India's economy will accelerate in 2015 but will fail to attain the heady growth rates of the past decade without sweeping structural reforms, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development said on Wednesday.

Japan's Fujifilm Holdings Corp said it was difficult to estimate the profitability of its influenza drug Avigan, which has been earmarked to fight Ebola, given the uncertainty over the spread of virus, a company executive said on Thursday.

French economist Jean Tirole won the 2014 Nobel Prize for economics for work that has shed light on how governments can "tame" the big businesses that dominate once-public monopolies like railways, highways and telecommunications.

Medical equipment supplier Becton Dickinson & Co (BDX.N) has agreed to buy CareFusion Corp (CFN.N), a maker of infusion pumps and other medical devices, for $12.2 billion in cash and stock, marking the latest multibillion-dollar healthcare sector deal.