Drug Topics

FEBRUARY 21, 2024

How much longer can independent pharmacists survive with the current method of reimbursement?

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Pharmacy Times

APRIL 17, 2024

If approved, the test could provide more timely and accurate diagnosis, hopefully mitigating the impact of Alzheimer disease (AD) on individuals and the community.

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STAT

APRIL 23, 2024

WASHINGTON — Testing conducted by the Food and Drug Administration on pasteurized commercially purchased milk has found genetic evidence of the H5N1 bird flu virus, the agency confirmed Tuesday. But the testing, done by polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, cannot distinguish between live virus or fragments of viruses that could have been killed by the pasteurization process.

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Fierce Healthcare

APRIL 3, 2024

As artificial intelligence rapidly advances in healthcare, the industry is grappling with how to evaluate AI models for accuracy and performance and monitor the technology for any downstream advers | The healthcare industry is grappling with how to evaluate AI models for accuracy and performance and monitor the technology for any downstream adverse outcomes.

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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.

Fierce Pharma

APRIL 23, 2024

Giovanni Caforio, M.D., is lining up a new gig soon after handing all his Bristol Myers Squibb leadership roles in March. | Giovanni Caforio, M.D., is lining up a new gig soon after handing all his Bristol Myers Squibb leadership roles in March. The recent Big Pharma CEO, known for steering the $74 billion acquisition of Celgene, has been proposed as the new chair at Novartis for 2025.

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pharmaphorum

MARCH 4, 2024

Inhaled cannabinoids have been shown to perform better than placebo in providing pain relief for people suffering from acute migraine in a clinical trial

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PharmaVoice

APRIL 15, 2024

The biotech is developing a ‘gene-agnostic’ approach to expand the patient pool for gene therapies.

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The Guardian - Pharmaceutical Industry

APRIL 14, 2024

Exclusive: contaminated blood campaigners say internal 1976 Immuno AG document proves British government negligence Analysis: families hope report will finally apportion blame The British government was willing to risk infecting NHS patients to get “lower-priced” blood products, according to a document that campaigners claim proves state and corporate guilt in one of the country’s worst ever scandals.

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STAT

APRIL 21, 2024

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which has been under pressure from scientists both at home and abroad to share more data on the H5N1 bird flu outbreaks in dairy cows, uploaded a large number of genetic sequences of the pathogen late Sunday. Access to the 239 genetic sequences will help scientists assess whether the dangerous virus has acquired mutations that might make it easier for it to spread to and among mammals, and whether additional changes have been seen as it moves from cow to cow a

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STAT

APRIL 22, 2024

The ambitious idea of using CRISPR to cure genetic diseases before birth is one step closer to reality. Scientists reported on Monday that they used a form of the technology known as “ base editing ” to alter the DNA of laboratory monkeys in the womb, substantially reducing the levels of a toxic protein that causes a fatal liver disease before the animals had even been born.

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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

APRIL 23, 2024

The trend is clear: When hospitals in the same community merge, prices spike. The government has such an easy time blocking those deals, hospitals rarely propose them anymore. But a study released Tuesday adds to a growing body of evidence that prices still go up even if the merging hospitals are far apart. The Federal Trade Commission has never tried to block such cross-market mergers, but antitrust experts say these latest findings add to what could become a strong legal argument against the d

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STAT

APRIL 22, 2024

The Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has transformed not just abortion access but maternal health care across the United States, causing physicians in states with restrictive laws to shift treatment of conditions including ectopic pregnancy and miscarriage. The full scale of the impact, though, has been obscured in a polarized political climate where physicians are often afraid to speak out, or are blocked by their hospitals from talking about their experiences post-Dobbs.

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Hospitals 143

STAT

APRIL 18, 2024

In the chaotic first few months of the Covid-19 pandemic, stores faced shortages of all kinds — toilet paper, canned food, and especially, cleaning supplies. With everyone scrubbing their groceries, mail, even library books, good luck finding antibacterial wipes or disinfectant sprays back then. That’s because public health advice in early 2020 focused on sanitizing surfaces, not protecting against a virus that could be spread through the air.

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STAT

APRIL 18, 2024

As two former secretaries of Health and Human Services, we are all too familiar with the struggle of finding narrow openings for bipartisanship. Despite our different approaches, we believe that addressing health care costs is a truly bipartisan issue. To be serious about creating access for people to the best possible care, that care must be affordable for patients and taxpayers.

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Pharmacy Management Software

STAT

APRIL 17, 2024

Eli Lilly reported positive results for its obesity drug Zepbound in obstructive sleep apnea, giving the medication a new edge in the highly competitive obesity market. The results also pave the way for Zepbound to potentially become the first approved treatment for obstructive sleep apnea, or OSA, a common disorder characterized by breathing interruptions during sleep.

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STAT

APRIL 17, 2024

The fight against malaria is a test of human intelligence against mosquitoes — and so far, our minuscule winged enemy is winning. But new results shared this week show substantial improvements in one of the most important tools we have to prevent the life-threatening disease: bed nets. Results shared this week by the New Nets Project, an initiative funded by Unitaid and the Global Fund, highlighted a pair of second-generation bed nets tested in endemic areas between 2019 and 2022.

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STAT

APRIL 15, 2024

Nearly a decade ago, venture capitalist Bob Nelsen called industry veteran Vicki Sato to pitch her on launching a large company dedicated to tackling the world’s worst pathogens. “This is a crazy idea,” Sato said. Nelsen, managing director of ARCH Venture, had made a name and fortune off crazy ideas, but generally it was the science that sounded crazy: engineering cells to cure cancer, finding drugs to slow aging.

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STAT

APRIL 14, 2024

As diligent taxpayers breathe a sigh of relief that the hassle of filing their tax forms is over for another year, the Internal Revenue Service continues to let most U.S. hospitals pay nothing in federal taxes. It’s time for Congress to take a hard look at the IRS’s hand in health care. The agency uses a vague “community benefit” standard to liberally grant tax-exempt status to so-called nonprofit hospitals even as many of them are financially taking advantage of sick

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STAT

APRIL 22, 2024

Last month, nearly 40,000 medical students were accepted into residency programs on “Match Day.” Surrounded by family and friends, these soon-to-be-physicians opened envelopes revealing where they would begin their careers. This moment marked the culmination of a residency match process that requires medical students to make a series of choices and rankings about which medical specialty to practice and at which health system, along with the various lifestyle factors inherent in suc

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APRIL 23, 2024

The Federal Trade Commission approved a far-reaching noncompete ban Tuesday that could force sweeping changes across the health care industry. But those changes may not take effect for years — if they ever do — because the contentious rule will almost certainly be held up in litigation. Commissioners voted three to two in favor of approving the final rule banning noncompete agreements across all sectors of the economy, a change the agency says will lead to more new businesses and h

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STAT

APRIL 18, 2024

An ongoing investigation into data integrity at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has resulted in a string of retractions, the latest of which is a 2006 Science paper co-authored by institute president and CEO Laurie Glimcher. The retraction notice, published in Science on Thursday, noted that the authors had become aware of discrepancies in key scientific images that led them to lose confidence in key figures in the study, although the study’s lead author opposed the retraction.

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STAT

APRIL 12, 2024

The recent detection of H5N1 bird flu in U.S. cattle, coupled with reports of a dairy worker contracting the virus , demands a departure from the usual reassurances offered by federal health officials. While they emphasize there’s no cause for alarm and assert diligent monitoring, it’s imperative we break from this familiar script. H5N1, a strain of the flu virus known to infect bird species globally and several mammalian species in the U.S. since 2022, has now appeared to have bre

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STAT

APRIL 11, 2024

WASHINGTON — Bernie Sanders is pushing for a long Covid “moonshot.” He released a draft legislative proposal this week, a follow up to a milestone hearing in January that sounded the alarm on long Covid as a pressing public health crisis. The pitch calls for $10 billion in mandatory funding over the next decade to establish a new long Covid research program at the National Institutes of Health.

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STAT

APRIL 11, 2024

Medicare for the first time has estimated that a new Alzheimer’s treatment could cost the program billions of dollars by next year — well beyond what Wall Street or even the drug’s manufacturer have projected — according to a document obtained by STAT. Medicare’s actuaries expect the drug Leqembi , made by the Japanese drugmaker Eisai and sold in partnership with Biogen, to cost the traditional Medicare program around $550 million in 2024, and the entire Medica

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STAT

APRIL 23, 2024

Anyone who has gone to a hospital’s emergency room expecting to receive medical care — not knowing where else to turn, uncertain whether a loved one is having a medical emergency and what can be done about it, or unsure if they can pay — has relied on a law they couldn’t name: the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA).

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Hospitals 136

STAT

APRIL 10, 2024

SAN DIEGO — Cancer vaccines have traveled a potholed road over the last decade. But as researchers from different companies and academic institutions presented promising early data at the American Association for Cancer Research annual meeting in San Diego this week, experts said there’s a collective feeling of turning a corner. “There’s a lot more interest in vaccines” now that the technology is improving, said Roy Herbst, chief of medical oncology at Yale Can

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Pharmacy Times

FEBRUARY 26, 2024

“I’m better than I was before I had long COVID, and in so many ways,” said a patient in an interview with Pharmacy Times.

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STAT

APRIL 9, 2024

One of the country’s biggest life insurers is venturing into genetic testing, an area that’s historically been a minefield for that industry, in a purported effort to keep its members alive longer.  MassMutual announced Tuesday that it’s offering many of its 4.2 million policyholders free genetic risk assessments for eight common diseases, like heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and breast cancer.

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STAT

APRIL 16, 2024

In the first federal hearing focused on the massive cyberattack on Change Healthcare , lawmakers had many important questions for UnitedHealth, which owns Change: Did it meet Health and Human Services’ cybersecurity performance goals ? Has UnitedHealth exploited physicians’ cash shortfalls caused by the Change outage to acquire struggling practices?

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Hospitals 142

STAT

APRIL 11, 2024

It seemed as if Logan Jenner had the best possible chance for a cure. Diagnosed at age 3 with acute myeloid leukemia, an aggressive blood cancer, Logan happened to have a targetable mutation that occurs in a small minority of childhood AML cases, making it possible for him to receive a precision therapy drug that — with chemotherapy — got him to a point where he could receive a bone marrow transplant.

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STAT

APRIL 18, 2024

For a company moving as quickly as possible to build artificial intelligence into everything — including health care — Microsoft spends a lot of time talking about how to regulate it. The tech giant has helped organize four separate coalitions to devise guidelines and technical standards for AI in health care. It supplies these groups — composed of health systems, government regulators, and other health businesses — with top executives to serve on steering committees,

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Hospitals 140

STAT

APRIL 8, 2024

Anyone can now walk into a pharmacy in the United States and buy oral contraceptives over the counter without a prescription, thanks to the FDA’s approval of norgestrel (Opill). This change reflects the drug’s safety and the public health imperative to ensure wider access to birth control. But another safe class of medicine that addresses a massive public health need remains unavailable except by prescription: the antidepressants known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor

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STAT

APRIL 8, 2024

For the vast majority of pancreatic cancer cases, the tumor grows undetected until it has already spread locally or to distant parts of the body. That means most patients, over 80% by some estimates, are diagnosed when it’s already too late to do surgery — depriving them of their best chance for a cure. “For the majority of patients, we cannot resect the tumor.

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STAT

APRIL 7, 2024

SAN DIEGO — Cancer cases among younger people have been rising for years, a trend researchers have struggled to explain. New evidence suggests a significant factor: younger generations seem to be aging faster at the cellular level than their predecessors. A team of scientists at Washington University in St. Louis tracked data from nearly 150,000 people between the ages of 37 and 54 in the U.K.

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