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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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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Pharmacy Times

OCTOBER 24, 2024

The FDA announces a Class II recall for the lot #220128, which were reported to contain the presence of nitrosamine.

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Fierce Healthcare

OCTOBER 11, 2024

This story was reported in partnership with Uncloseted Media, a nonpartisan, investigative, LGBTQ | Ending the HIV epidemic hinges on both treatment and prevention, particularly through access to PrEP. For at-risk individuals living in the U.S. South—where HIV is a daunting reality—PrEP use is very low compared to the number of new HIV cases.

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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

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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The Guardian - Pharmaceutical Industry

OCTOBER 16, 2024

Novo Nordisk’s decision will force people in developing countries to use outdated glass vials and syringes, warn campaigners The pharmaceutical company behind injectable weight-loss drugs has been accused of prioritising profits over the health of people in developing countries by halting production of its insulin pens. People living with type 1 diabetes who are reliant on the human insulin produced by Novo Nordisk, will instead be given glass vials and syringes – which they say are inconvenient

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pharmaphorum

OCTOBER 14, 2024

Eli Lilly may invest $364m in the UK and work with the government to tackle serious public health challenges including obesity.

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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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OCTOBER 25, 2024

For the nation’s largest health insurer, the evidence of abuse was stunning and unmistakable: UnitedHealth Group reaped billions from the federal Medicare program by diagnosing patients with serious chronic illnesses, and then delivering no follow-up care. The findings in the federal report reveal that UnitedHealth repeatedly sent clinicians into patients’ homes and pored over their medical charts to add diagnoses for illnesses such as vascular disease, heart failure, and diabetes.

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OCTOBER 24, 2024

Imagine, for a moment, that you wake up one morning with a debilitating illness that won’t let go. Weeks and months pass, but the crushing fatigue, constant headaches, and aching muscles remain. You can’t think straight. Simply showering or doing the dishes leaves you floored for days at a time, and the unpredictable symptoms — shortness of breath, dizziness, a racing heart — ebb and flow without warning.

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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

OCTOBER 24, 2024

For years, it has been a reliable way to cut back on the consumption of cigarettes and sugary drinks: raise taxes on them. So it might seem an obvious tactic to apply to alcohol, which contributes to untold injuries, diseases and deaths in the United States each year. That’s the thinking of advocates and state legislators across the country, who also see it as a way to pull in more revenue.

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OCTOBER 24, 2024

Novo Nordisk’s drug Ozempic was linked to a lower risk of getting diagnosed with Alzheimer’s among people with type 2 diabetes, an analysis of medical records found, supporting the case for further research of the blockbuster GLP-1 drug in neurodegenerative diseases. Among the over 1 million people with diabetes whose records were included in the study, the overall risk of developing Alzheimer’s was already very low.

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OCTOBER 22, 2024

Novo Nordisk has asked the Food and Drug Administration to bar compounding pharmacies from making copies of its blockbuster weight loss drug semaglutide, arguing that the medication is too complex for the pharmacies to safely make. Compounding pharmacies are typically allowed to make copies of drugs that are deemed to be in shortage by the FDA, which semaglutide has been for over two years.

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STAT

OCTOBER 25, 2024

A turbulent series of events surrounding the supply of Eli Lilly’s blockbuster weight loss treatment has raised concerns around how the Food and Drug Administration maintains its list of drug shortages and which sources it relies on, an issue that affects a growing number of Americans. Earlier this month, the FDA declared an end to the shortage of Lilly’s tirzepatide, sold as Mounjaro for diabetes and Zepbound for obesity, after almost two years.

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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

STAT

OCTOBER 21, 2024

If you were hoping to see where ultra-processed foods might fit in the next Dietary Guidelines for Americans, hold that thought. Scientific experts tasked with advising federal officials drafting the 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans said the data were far too limited to draw conclusions. Meeting Monday, the first of two days of presentations, they discussed research findings to inform a report to the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Agriculture.

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OCTOBER 18, 2024

Pascal Geldsetzer believes in open access, in disseminating science as quickly as it happens. Even so, last summer, as he uploaded the surprising results of his latest study to the MedRxiv preprint server, the Stanford University epidemiologist was feeling something other than the usual excitement. “I was scared to put this up because it’s such a different approach from what’s generally done in epidemiology and medicine,” he said.

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OCTOBER 17, 2024

The nation’s three largest Medicare Advantage insurers increasingly refused to pay for rehabilitative care for seniors in the years after adopting sophisticated technologies to aid in their coverage decisions, a Senate investigation found. UnitedHealth Group, Humana, and CVS Health targeted denials among older adults who were requesting care in nursing homes, inpatient rehab hospitals, and long-term hospitals.

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OCTOBER 17, 2024

In the last two years, telehealth has gone all in on GLP-1s. Dozens of companies have started to offer the wildly popular obesity and diabetes medications, meeting patients who are flooding online for prescriptions that could help them lose as much as 20% of their body weight.  The telehealth GLP-1 boom wouldn’t be possible without clinicians willing to write prescriptions for those hundreds of thousands of patients.

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OCTOBER 16, 2024

If you’re aware of the H5N1 bird flu outbreak in U.S. dairy cattle — you may have seen some headlines or read something on social media — perhaps you are wondering what the fuss is about. Yes, there have been nearly a couple dozen human cases, but all have had mild symptoms. The virus does not decimate herds in the way it does poultry flocks; most — though not all — of the infected cows come through the illness OK.

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OCTOBER 16, 2024

The emails from UnitedHealth Group managers were filled with exclamation marks and pleasantries about the weather. But the underlying message to doctors in late 2020 was persistent and urgent: Hit your targets to see more patients. We need to bring in more money. At the time, deaths from Covid-19 were surging, and no vaccine was available.

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STAT

OCTOBER 15, 2024

You’re reading the web version of Health Care Inc., STAT’s weekly newsletter following the flow of money in medicine. Sign up  to get it in your inbox every Monday. Hello, you spry bunch. We’re coming to you on a Tuesday after yesterday’s holiday. What are you looking to read more about as the year winds down? Let us know: bob.herman@statnews.com.

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OCTOBER 14, 2024

It may be time to add Covid-19 infection to the list of possible risk factors for developing type 2 diabetes at a young age.  An observational study published Monday in JAMA Network Open found that children and adolescents were one-and-a-half times more likely to be diagnosed with the metabolic disorder in the months after having Covid-19 compared to similar kids who weathered other respiratory infections.

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OCTOBER 14, 2024

When the U.S. health care system pivoted to meet Covid-19 in 2020, routine health visits and screenings where many cancer cases would have been caught didn’t happen. It wasn’t ideal, but many health experts thought that as the country opened back up, screenings would help “catch up” to these missed cases. A new paper published Monday in JAMA Network Open suggests that didn’t happen as quickly as experts had hoped.

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OCTOBER 14, 2024

Biotech investors have been buzzing around new areas of drug development this year, such as the red-hot obesity market. But there’s one field that has seen an even more significant amount of activity: autoimmune diseases. Companies that are developing new medicines for autoimmune conditions, as well as other immune system disorders, have brought in more money and closed more deals so far this year than most other areas, including the cardiometabolic field, data from investment bank Oppenh

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OCTOBER 15, 2024

On Sept. 26, the FDA approved the first truly new antipsychotic in decades: Cobenfy. In clinical trials, it didn’t cause certain side effects that traditionally interfere with medication adherence, including weight gain, lethargy, and movement disorders. I have schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type — a combination of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder — and I agree that this is a monumental development for my community.

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OCTOBER 16, 2024

Barney Graham, who for decades helped lead U.S. vaccine development efforts , said Wednesday that the lack of cooperation among U.S. agencies is hindering the country’s response to the H5N1 bird flu outbreak among dairy cattle, echoing criticisms that have been building over the past six months.  “The USDA and the CDC and the NIH are not sharing and coordinating,” Graham said, referring to the federal agriculture department, the Centers for Disease Control and Preventio

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OCTOBER 15, 2024

It was a dramatic call to action by the American Heart Association: The organization declared its decade-long goal culminating in 2020 was to slash deaths from cardiovascular disease and stroke by 20%. It also promised in its scientific journal to move all Americans toward “ideal cardiovascular health.” That never happened. Deaths did decrease by 15% from 2010, but it was a “disappointment” that fatalities linked to conditions like high blood pressure, heart failure,

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OCTOBER 11, 2024

Since the Nobel Prizes were created in 1901, just 24 women have received awards in the sciences. This year, that number stayed the same: All seven laureates in physics , chemistry , and physiology or medicine were men.  Some scientists have expressed frustration about the lack of women in this year’s awardees, particularly the omission of two women who contributed to the work honored for the prize in physiology or medicine.

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OCTOBER 11, 2024

Recently, California Gov. Gavin Newsom granted $130.7 million for local governments addressing homelessness, including clearing encampments. It comes in the wake of  a June Supreme Court ruling that gave cities full authority to implement and enforce policies that would allow them to clear encampments as they see fit. In early August, Newsom was even filmed removing homeless people’s belongings from public view in Mission Hills in Los Angeles County.

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OCTOBER 29, 2024

As Chinese biopharma companies rise on the international stage, they are increasingly finding VC partners — in the United States. U.S. companies have long signed licensing deals with Chinese drugmakers. But increasingly American venture capitalists are building U.S.-based companies from scratch to test and ultimately seek to commercialize innovative drugs developed in China.

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OCTOBER 25, 2024

When Chelsea Smith met Jason Martin she knew right away that he was the one — so she refused to get his phone number. That’s because getting married would make Smith ineligible for Social Security benefits and Medicaid — financial support that she and many others with disabilities need to survive. Smith didn’t want to risk falling in love knowing she couldn’t get married.

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OCTOBER 9, 2024

Newly published data show that seven out of 67 children who received Bluebird Bio’s gene therapy for a devastating neurological disorder in clinical trials have since gone on to develop blood cancers.  That means four additional patients have developed blood cancers since June 2022, when concerns about three cancer cases prompted the Food and Drug Administration to hold a hearing of outside advisers before approving the treatment, marketed as Skysona.

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OCTOBER 8, 2024

WASHINGTON — On Tuesday, Vice President Harris’ presidential campaign released a proposal to crack down on middlemen in the pharmaceutical industry.  It seems billionaire business mogul Mark Cuban had a heads up.

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