pharmaphorum

NOVEMBER 2, 2020

The UK drugs regulator has awarded a £1.5 million tender to a software company for an artificial intelligence tool that will be used to process “the expected high volume of COVID-19 vaccine adverse drug reactions (ADRs).”. The tender awarded to Maidenhead, Berkshire-based GenPact UK aims to “ensure that no details from the ADRs…are missed” as the UK prepares to start rolling out COVID-19 vaccines – assuming their safety and efficacy is supported in late-stage trials.

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Vaccines 145

Outsourcing Pharma

SEPTEMBER 28, 2020

Ena Respiratoryâs preventative nasal spray treatment could reach human trials within four months, following results from an animal study released today which showed the spray reduced COVID-19 replication by up to 96%.

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Pharma Marketing Network

OCTOBER 13, 2020

Below is a Q&A with Mark Bard, Co-Founder of The DHC Group, who offers his insights on the challenges COVID-19 has brought to pharma, as well as what innovation is taking place due to this full shift to digital and what lies ahead in the future. What is the most challenging aspect of COVID-19 for the industry? Mark Bard: I think the most challenging aspect of the current situation is the inability of anyone – patient, physician, payor, or pharma – to truly predict how long it will take for v

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Fierce Healthcare

JUNE 30, 2020

10 indicted in $1.4B rural hospital fraudulent billing scheme: DOJ. pminemyer. Tue, 06/30/2020 - 10:14.

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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.

Pharma Times

AUGUST 20, 2020

The Phase III study is evaluating the safety, tolerability and immunogenicity of GSK’s MenABCWY vaccine candidate compared to Bexsero and Menveo

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Vaccines 71

pharmaphorum

SEPTEMBER 30, 2020

The signatories of a new Biotech Social Pact with Europe and patients explain why healthcare calls for a new social contract, not a pharmaceutical strategy. As Europe continues its efforts to battle the Covid-19 pandemic, it is rightfully focusing its attention on the longer-term implications of this crisis. One common thread is clearly emerging from EU and national discussions: to reinforce Europe’s “strategic autonomy” and “technological sovereignty” in key industrial sectors.

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pharmaphorum

OCTOBER 19, 2020

Regular fliers are used to long queues to clear security – but a rigorous COVID-19 testing regime could be added to pre-flight checks backed by a digital “health passport” to prove passengers are free from the coronavirus. The UK is the latest country to test the scheme that allows passengers to demonstrate their coronavirus status as part of a global framework for COVID-safe air travel.

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Vaccines 140

pharmaphorum

SEPTEMBER 28, 2020

The FDA has launched its Digital Health Center of Excellence (DHCoE), as the agency continues with its commitment to advancing use of technology such as mobile health devices, software and wearables to create medical products. Housed within the agency’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, the DHCoE is part of a wider strategy to encourage development of digital health products and therapeutics.

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FDA 140

pharmaphorum

SEPTEMBER 23, 2020

Life science companies must evolve and find new ways of working that erase the lines between industries and sub-sectors if they are to adapt to the digitalised world. That’s according to the team at Sweden’s Sahlgrenska Science Park, who are getting ready to host a virtual event looking at how the specialisation of digital expertise is driving a trend of sector convergence that pharma is only just cottoning on to.

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pharmaphorum

OCTOBER 22, 2020

Cancer doesn’t end when treatment stops – it’s a lifelong journey and people need support throughout, says patient advocate Megan-Claire Chase. No one gets through cancer unscathed. People are usually left with a mixture of treatment aftereffects, toxic positivity, and lingering anger to deal with. Megan-Claire Chase , a fierce patient advocate who has been blogging about her experiences since she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2015, said the disease never went away.

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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

pharmaphorum

AUGUST 10, 2020

Swiss medical data specialist Sophia Genetics has launched a platform that will sift through data generated at more than 1,000 hospitals around the world to try to work out how the COVID-19 pandemic will evolve in the coming months and years. The data mining tool will be used to try to unearth some of the many unknowns with the virus, using next-generation sequencing (NGS) to see how the genome of SARS-CoV-2 changes over time, along with patient genetic information, results of lung and CT scans,

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pharmaphorum

SEPTEMBER 30, 2020

Regeneron’s antibody cocktail seems to reduce levels of coronavirus and improve symptoms in patients, according to early test results. This first data comes from a descriptive analysis from the seamless phase 1/2/3 trial that Regeneron hopes will hurry the medicine dubbed REGN-COV2 to market. The ongoing double-blind trial measures the effect of adding REGN-COV2 to usual standard of care, compared with usual standard of care.

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pharmaphorum

NOVEMBER 27, 2020

A new EMA approval has expanded the use of Vertex Pharma’s exon-skipping cystic fibrosis therapy Symkevi to children as young as six if they have specific gene mutations. The regulator has given a green light to use of Symkevi (tezacaftor/ivacaftor) with Vertex’ Kalydeco (ivacaftor) in patients ages six years and older who have two copies of the F508del mutation in the CFTR gene, or one F508del copy and one of 14 other so-called “minimal function” mutations in CFTR.

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pharmaphorum

SEPTEMBER 21, 2020

Compass Pathways and its potential magic mushroom depression drug went public last week – and now psychedelic therapy firm Mind Medicine is aiming to follow suit by up-listing its shares on the Nasdaq. UK-based Compass has a patented synthetic version of psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, and raised around $127.5 million with its IPO on Friday and shares are still significantly above their launch price of $17.

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pharmaphorum

NOVEMBER 27, 2020

Amanda Barrell explores how a perfect storm of changing economics, advances in technology, and the increasing volume of the patient voice is stoking change in the rare disease space. New models of drug development are fuelling life-changing advantages in the rare disease space, previously an economic no-go area for pharma and biotech companies. That was among the discussion points during Fighting Rare Diseases – The Science, Economics and the Patients , a webinar hosted by o2h Group.

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pharmaphorum

NOVEMBER 2, 2020

The pharmaceutical industry has sometimes been a laggard in terms of digital maturity, but the COVID-19 crisis has provided companies the impetus to rapidly implement the most cutting-edge technologies. At the heart of most of these digital advancements is AI and machine learning. With a collective sense of uncertainty, many are pinning their hopes on a vaccine and treatment, and sophisticated technology could help speed up the process of finding an effective medicine.

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pharmaphorum

SEPTEMBER 10, 2020

Two UK biotechs – Destiny Pharma and Sporegen – have joined forces to develop a nasal spray that they say could serve as a first line of defense against coronavirus infections. The nasal spray could provide protection from infection within a few days of administration, and would be easy to make in bulk at a low cost, say the partners. The programme is still in the early stages of development, but if it works in trials would provide another approach to prevent transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the viru

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Outsourcing Pharma

AUGUST 11, 2020

American Gene Technologies has received the agencyâs approval to launch the first human trial for its lead HIV program, starting in Baltimore and DC.

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FDA 145

pharmaphorum

OCTOBER 26, 2020

Preventive care programmes are key to better health outcomes, but several factors are limiting their uptake. A new analysis looks at these barriers and asks how they could be overcome. Over the past decade, many healthcare systems have worked to expand their focus on health maintenance and disease prevention as several studies have indicated that preventive care services can play a significant role in improving general health while helping reduce long term healthcare costs.

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pharmaphorum

SEPTEMBER 24, 2020

A potential COVID-19 breath test has been unveiled in the UK, as the country desperately searches for alternatives to crippling lockdown measures to prevent the disease from spreading. The breath test has been developed by Integumen in collaboration with Modern Water, Avacta and Aptamer Group, which had been working on test that identifies the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus in waste water.

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pharmaphorum

AUGUST 18, 2020

Pharma companies have improved how they engage with healthcare providers as a result of COVID-19, according to a new survey of HCPs. This has resulted in pharma companies being more relevant and providing more value in closing the care gap, the report says. The Accenture survey of 720 general practitioners, oncologists, cardiologists and immunologists globally found that this is in turn helping HCPs better serve patients.

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pharmaphorum

DECEMBER 23, 2020

NHS leaders have written to the UK prime minister urging him to extend the Brexit transition period by a month to avoid plunging the healthcare service into chaos on 1 January. The letter, published today by the NHS Confederation – a membership organisation representing NHS leaders from all parts of the health service, outlines concerns about the impact a no-deal outcome will have on delivering care to patients amid winter pressures and a rapid rise in COVID-19 infections. “The failu

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Communication 128

Outsourcing Pharma

DECEMBER 23, 2020

The analytical tool, developed via Bionano Genomics, maps structural variations in DNA that are known to cause disease and are tied to symptom severity.

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pharmaphorum

DECEMBER 2, 2020

Few companies embody the term ‘pharma giant’ as much as Pfizer. Here we take a look at the colourful history of one of the biggest drugmakers in the world. Pfizer was founded in 1849 by two recent German immigrants to the USA, Charles Pfizer and Charles Erhart. Both in their mid-twenties, the two men set up what was initially a fine chemicals business in a Brooklyn factory, using a loan from Pfizer’s father as capital.

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pharmaphorum

NOVEMBER 23, 2020

Janssen’s Daniel de Schryver tells us why it’s time to give patients a permanent seat at the table and improve health outcomes through patient-pharma dialogue. I’m struck by just how much we thrive when we share a common purpose; when – as a society, a group or a family unit – we work together to achieve the same goal. It’s no different in healthcare.

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pharmaphorum

NOVEMBER 24, 2020

A merger involving two US digital health specialists and a blank cheque company has created a telemedicine player, called UpHealth, that is valued at more than $1.3 billion. The three-way deal combines UpHealth – which provides patient care management, telemedicine and digital pharmacy services and gives its name to the new group – with CloudBreak, which provides a video consultation platform for doctors and patients.

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pharmaphorum

OCTOBER 23, 2020

Novartis is opening a new digital health innovation hub in Canada to help develop “scalable, digital solutions” for patients and healthcare providers. The Canadian Biome Digital Innovation Hub will be based in Montreal at the artificial intelligence research institute, Mila. The institute formed a strategic alliance with Novartis in 2019. Canada is the latest country to join a global network of hubs opened by Novartis.

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pharmaphorum

OCTOBER 19, 2020

As part of our series of opinion pieces from leaders at Janssen, the company’s Maria Raad looks at how we can embrace tech and data science to overcome increasing pressures on healthcare systems. For the next generation born in the western world, living to be 100 will be the norm. While this seems like a desirable aspiration for our grandchildren, it adds new pressures on our healthcare systems.

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pharmaphorum

OCTOBER 6, 2020

An Excel spreadsheet was behind IT glitch that caused thousands of positive COVID-19 tests to be omitted from the UK’s official records, according to press reports. The issue that left almost 16,000 positive results going unreported has been blamed on the way Public Health England tracks results from mainly private labs that have been hired to add extra testing capacity.

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pharmaphorum

AUGUST 12, 2020

Author and journalist John-Manuel Andriote has spent much of his career writing about the impact of HIV/AIDS – a job that became much more personal when he himself was diagnosed in 2005. He tells pharmaphorum about the importance of resilience in coping with a serious illness. John first began writing about HIV/AIDS as a journalist in 1986. “I had two friends of mine in their 20s die from AIDS while I was in journalism school in 1985 – a time when AIDS was always in the news and there was a lot

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pharmaphorum

AUGUST 21, 2020

An app developed by Kaia Health to help people suffering from back pain who may not want to take painkillers has shown its worth again in a study conducted with a health benefit plan in the US. The pilot study of the app – which combines physical therapy, relaxation exercises and medical information to help back pain sufferers manage their condition – showed it was able to reduce self-reported pain and sleep quality.

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pharmaphorum

DECEMBER 24, 2020

The UK’s COVID-19 vaccination programme could get a speed boost, with the country’s drugs regulator expected to make a decision on a shot from Oxford University/AstraZeneca in the next few days. If the vaccine becomes available the UK will be able to step up its vaccination programme as large swathes of the country face draconian “Tier 4” restrictions due to the emergence of as more infectious variant.

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pharmaphorum

DECEMBER 21, 2020

2020’s M&A activity hasn’t quite reached the heights of last year’s, where two pharma mega-mergers – BMS’ buyout of Celegne and AbbVie’s acquisition of Allergan – accounted for almost 40% of total M&A deal values. That said, there were still some interesting moves indicating new directions of travel for big pharma players – with most deals focused on specific drugs from biotechs, particularly in cancer (though we did get rumours of an AstraZeneca-Gilead merger , which would have been the

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pharmaphorum

OCTOBER 30, 2020

Since entering the pharmaceutical industry as a graduate trainee in the late 1990s, Asad Mohsin Ali’s career has taken him across the business from Novartis, MSD and Tesaro, before joining global biopharma Ipsen. He tells us how the company has responded to COVID and how he’d like to see the UK industry grow in the future. As managing director, Ipsen UK & Ireland, Ali heads up one of Ipsen’s three global hubs, as well as chairing a UK & Ireland Site Steering Committee overseeing 900 peop

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