Drug Topics

OCTOBER 3, 2024

Senators Ron Wyden and Sherrod Brown wrote a letter to the Federal Trade Commission calling to explore yet another PBM tactic impeding competition.

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NOVEMBER 18, 2024

The genetic sequence of the H5N1 bird flu virus that infected a teenager in British Columbia shows that the virus had undergone mutational changes that would make it easier for that version of H5N1 to infect people, scientists who have studied the data say.  There’s currently no evidence the teenager, who remains in critical condition in hospital, infected anyone else.

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Hospitals 145

Fierce Healthcare

NOVEMBER 18, 2024

Oura is partnering with medical device maker Dexcom to integrate data from glucose biosensors with the Oura Ring, which tracks sleep, heart rate and activity. | Oura is partnering with medical device maker Dexcom to integrate data from glucose biosensors with the Oura Ring.

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Pharmacy Times

NOVEMBER 18, 2024

The disorder presents as severe lung disease, with lung transplantation as the only current therapeutic option for long-term survival.

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FDA 117

Speaker: Simran Kaur, Founder & CEO at Tattva Health Inc.

The healthcare landscape is being revolutionized by AI and cutting-edge digital technologies, reshaping how patients receive care and interact with providers. In this webinar led by Simran Kaur, we will explore how AI-driven solutions are enhancing patient communication, improving care quality, and empowering preventive and predictive medicine. You'll also learn how AI is streamlining healthcare processes, helping providers offer more efficient, personalized care and enabling faster, data-driven

Patient Care

Fierce Pharma

NOVEMBER 8, 2024

A subcutaneous version of Daiichi Sankyo’s AstraZeneca-partnered blockbuster antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) Enhertu could be in the works from Korea’s Alteogen following a licensing deal worth up to | Alteogen will use its human hyaluronidase hybridization platform to develop a subcutaneous formulation of the blockbuster antibody-drug conjugate.

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PharmaVoice

OCTOBER 8, 2024

This year’s PharmaVoice 100 encompasses the industry’s ongoing revolutions and leaders who are not only navigating these changes, but at times, forging new paths for others to follow.

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Pharmaceutical Technology

NOVEMBER 6, 2024

GSK CEO Emma Walmsley said the sector would need to wait to see who is appointed in key roles in the Trump administration to gauge impact.

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Vaccines 130

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NOVEMBER 18, 2024

If he can make it past the Senate, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will be the next secretary of Health and Human Services. Since the position was created, each secretary has had significant experience in public health, health care administration, or related government work. None has listed “spreading vaccine misinformation” as their primary health care experience.

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Vaccines 145

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NOVEMBER 19, 2024

When Makena, a drug designed to prevent preterm births, hit the market in 2011 at $1,500 per dose, it drew rife backlash. The drug was based on an active ingredient that had been available for many years at a much lower cost. Confronted with the public outcry, the FDA took an unusual step: It allowed pharmacies to continue making their own copies of the drug through the practice of pharmacy compounding, selling it at a fraction of Makena’s price.

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Compounding FDA 127

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NOVEMBER 15, 2024

As the saying goes, you are what you eat. And, unfortunately, the food we eat is only solidifying America’s tragic title: We have the lowest life expectancy among large high-income countries. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is taking a number of steps to help people in the U.S. build healthy diets — including with respect to ultra-processed foods — and the food industry and research community should, too.

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FDA 139

Speaker: Chris Antypas and Josh Halladay

Access to limited distribution drugs and payer contracts are key to pharmacy expansion. But how do you prepare your operations to take the next step? Meaningful data: Collect and share clinical data regarding outcomes, utilization, and more Reporting: Limited distribution models require efficient tracking and reporting systems Workflows: Align workflows with specific pharma and payer contractual requirements For in-depth, expert insights on pharmacy expansion, watch this webinar from Inovalon.

STAT

NOVEMBER 14, 2024

Measles vaccination coverage globally has still not recovered to pre-Covid levels, a fact that contributed to a 20% increase in measles cases in 2023 over the previous year, according to a new report from the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that was released Thursday. The pandemic backsliding is hindering efforts to eliminate measles globally, and subjecting children — generally children under the age of 5 — to a health threat that can b

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Vaccines 145

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NOVEMBER 19, 2024

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took leave as chairman of Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit known for spreading doubt about vaccines, to run for president last year. But he is still fighting in court alongside the group, putting him in an unusual position for someone nominated as Secretary of Health and Human Services.   If confirmed by the Senate, Kennedy will have power to guide the agencies he oversees toward his priorities.

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Vaccines FDA 134

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NOVEMBER 15, 2024

Michelle Monje-Deisseroth says she first treated patients with “the worst imaginable childhood brain tumor” as a medical student about 20 years ago. Diffuse intrinsic pontine gliomas, or DIPG, shackle themselves so insidiously around a young person’s brainstem that no chemo or scalpel can wrest them out. Most children didn’t survive a year.

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NOVEMBER 16, 2024

California has detected the country’s first case of a new mpox strain that is spreading from person to person. The infected individual had recently traveled from Eastern Africa, where multiple countries are battling transmission of this virus. The individual was treated in a health facility in San Mateo County and is in isolation at home, the California Department of Public Health announced in a statement released Saturday.

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Speaker: Dr. Ben Locwin - Biopharmaceutical Executive & Healthcare Futurist

What will the future hold for clinical research? A recent draft from the FDA provides valuable insight. In "Optimizing the Dosage of Human Prescription Drugs and Biological Products for the Treatment of Oncologic Diseases," the FDA notes that "targeted therapies demonstrate different dose-response relationships compared to cytotoxic chemotherapy, such that doses below the Maximum Tolerated Dose (MTD) may have similar efficacy to the MTD but with fewer toxicities.

FDA

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NOVEMBER 13, 2024

A Canadian teenager who is in critical condition after contracting H5N1 bird flu was infected with a version of the virus that is different from the one circulating in dairy cattle in the United States, Canadian authorities announced Wednesday. The National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg confirmed the infection was indeed caused by the H5N1 virus.

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NOVEMBER 12, 2024

The last time Mark Palinski went to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, he was asked to leave and never come back. He stills remembers the argument: All he had done was advocate for the use of the “gold standard” treatment opioid addiction, a common medication called buprenorphine.  To Palinski, buprenorphine is a godsend.

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NOVEMBER 11, 2024

23andMe, the genetics startup that has repeatedly captured the public imagination and then faced nearly fatal business challenges, announced Monday that it would halt its efforts to develop new medicines and lay off 40% of its workforce, focusing instead on selling genetic tests to consumers and using the resulting data for research. In closing its therapeutics division and laying off 200 people, 23andMe ended an audacious bet it made nearly a decade ago — that it could use the genetic da

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Fierce Healthcare

NOVEMBER 13, 2024

Primary care player Forward is abruptly shutting down its operations, closing its locations and canceling scheduled visits, the company publicly announced Wednesday. | Primary care player Forward is abruptly shutting down its operations, closing its locations and canceling scheduled visits, the company publicly announced Wednesday.

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Fierce Healthcare

NOVEMBER 19, 2024

More than half of health system and health plan executives say AI is an immediate priority, and 73% are increasing their investments in the technology, a new C-suite survey finds. | More than half of health system and health plan executives say AI is an immediate priority, and 73% are increasing their investments in the technology, a new C-suite survey finds.

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NOVEMBER 18, 2024

Nothing brought Olivia more joy than when her daughter and grandchild visited her group home in Brooklyn in the early 2000s. Each hug and shared laugh lit up her face with pride like any mother’s, grounded in love, family, and connection. Olivia’s story should not be remarkable, but history almost denied her the chance to experience her family.

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NOVEMBER 14, 2024

WASHINGTON — Peter Marks wants to keep his job. A top Food and Drug Administration official, Marks arrived Wednesday at the five-star hotel where the Milken Institute was hosting its Future of Health Summit via bicycle, having flown back to D.C. from Boston, where he spoke earlier in the day. In a black suit jacket and moccasins, he looked slightly nervous on a six-person panel.

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Vaccines FDA 145

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NOVEMBER 7, 2024

For months, as human cases of H5N1 bird flu associated with an outbreak of the virus in U.S. dairy cattle have mounted, one question has loomed larger than others: how many human infections are getting missed? Farmworkers face some of the most intense exposure to the bird flu virus, but resistance from farmers and a lack of health insurance and paid sick leave in the industry have limited the amount of testing of workers and hampered public health officials’ ability to track where the vir

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Insurance 145

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NOVEMBER 6, 2024

The executive in charge of AstraZeneca operations in China is under detention by Chinese authorities who are investigating employees there, the company said. The disclosure comes after AstraZeneca last week acknowledged that Leon Wang, an executive vice president who also oversees international operations for the drugmaker, was being investigated along with a “small number” of employees.

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NOVEMBER 10, 2024

ST. LOUIS — All morning, nurses had been coming in, taking vitals, offering blankets, pressing buttons to silence alarms. It would stay quiet for a bit, but then the beeping would start again, telling Tammy Clemons over and over that she was back in the emergency room. She wished she were elsewhere. She wished she were with her sister, who’d just had a stillborn baby in a different hospital, three miles away.

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Hospitals 141

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NOVEMBER 4, 2024

One ad shows two older men talking jovially on a front porch, “Vietnam veteran” visible on one of their hats. Another shows an older man in military regalia, arms crossed, smiling proudly at the camera.  Under names like “Patriot Plan,” “Courage MA,” and “Honor” plan, all of the major private Medicare insurers are courting veterans directly, selling plans that their ads say complement their Veterans Affairs coverage with benefits like

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Insurance 142

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NOVEMBER 5, 2024

A patient with sickle cell disease died while participating in a clinical trial of a CRISPR-based treatment from Beam Therapeutics, threatening to overshadow early signals of effective gene editing.  Beam said the patient succumbed to respiratory failure, deemed to be “likely caused” by a regimen of chemotherapy required to prepare the patient for BEAM-101, a treatment that uses the company’s new, more precise form of CRISPR gene editing called base editing.

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Chemotherapy 141

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NOVEMBER 12, 2024

The Department of Justice on Tuesday sued to prevent UnitedHealth Group from buying Amedisys, one of the largest home health and hospice chains in the country. The DOJ’s lawsuit, which is joined by the attorneys general from Maryland, Illinois, New Jersey, and New York, is one of the agency’s most aggressive actions to halt UnitedHealth from moving further into the delivery of health care.

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Insurance 128

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OCTOBER 30, 2024

H5N1 bird flu virus has been found in a pig on a farm in Oregon, the first time the virus has been seen in a pig in the United States, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported Wednesday. The pig, one of five on the farm, did not display signs of illness. Two others tested negative and testing is ongoing on the other two. All five were euthanized to allow for study of whether the animals were truly infected.

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NOVEMBER 4, 2024

Researchers like to say that science is self-correcting, that knowledge is slowly but surely refined by new findings that build on or debunk old ones. But this process is far from perfect and is hampered by sloppy experiments or, in some cases, faked results. A small, tight-knit community of scientific sleuths has been unearthing growing evidence that many studies, including landmark papers published in top journals, contain manipulated images and falsified findings.

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OCTOBER 28, 2024

A person from Iowa who recently returned to the United States from West Africa has died after contracting Lassa fever, a virus that can cause Ebola-like illness in some patients. State health officials reported the case on Monday. “I want to assure Iowans that the risk of transmission is incredibly low in our state. We continue to investigate and monitor this situation and are implementing the necessary public health protocols,” Robert Kruse, state medical director of the Iowa Depa

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OCTOBER 28, 2024

If one can point to anything good about the H5N1 bird flu outbreak in dairy cattle — to be honest, there’s nothing good about this situation — it’s the timing. Transmission of the virus through U.S. dairy herds took off when last winter’s flu season was effectively over, making the job of looking for people infected with H5N1 an easier task in theory, though there have been plenty of human hurdles impeding those efforts.

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OCTOBER 31, 2024

Barely 12 years after the publication of the first papers unveiling CRISPR-Cas9, a powerful enzyme for editing DNA, sickle cell patients are now receiving the first approved CRISPR-based medicine, Casgevy. Hundreds of patients with other inherited diseases, cancers, and chronic bacterial and viral infections are enrolled in clinical trials testing other CRISPR treatments.

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OCTOBER 29, 2024

Vaccines are the original immunotherapy, in the view of Ryan Sullivan, a cancer immunotherapy researcher and oncologist at Mass General Cancer Center. But many other modes of immunotherapy for cancer were approved first — checkpoint blockade drugs like Keytruda and engineered immune cell therapies like Yescarta. Shadowed by the successes of other therapies, the field of cancer vaccines was “seemingly dying,” Sullivan said.

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Vaccines Immunization 143