I'm taking some much needed time off for a couple of weeks. Actually, our scheduling guru at CNBC, Alex Crippen, told me if I don't use all of the days I've accumulated by the end of next month, I'll lose them. I consider myself a hard worker, but I'm not that generous. So, off I go.
I will try to blog a little here and there when possible on things of note.
Before I go, I want to point out one thing to watch for over the weekend that could impact trading in at least a few big pharma stocks on Monday morning. The results of the 13,000-patient study comparing the bloodthinner Plavix from Bristol-Myers Squibb and Sanofi-Aventis to the experimental bloodthinner prasugrel from Eli Lilly are coming out at 8 a.m. ET Sunday morning at the American Heart Association annual meeting.
They're also being simultaneously published online in The New England Journal of Medicine. You may recall, Lilly shares recently took a dive on news the company was halting patient enrollment in two small studies of the drug for unspecified reasons.
Even though Lilly cautioned people from reading too much into that action regarding the pending results of the larger clinical trial, analysts and investors assumed it couldn't be good and that it could mean the drug is such a potent bloodthinner that it may have caused potentially fatal excessive bleeding in some patients.
We'll find out Sunday morning. And on "Squawk Box" Monday morning, I've arranged for Joe Kernen to do a live interview with a Lilly drug development exec to talk about the results. Bristol, through a spokesman, declined to make anyone available for a live interview. Plavix is the second-biggest selling drug in the world, so a lot is riding on these results.
Questions? Comments? Pharma@cnbc.com