2024

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Government, Industry Leaders Address the Growing Issue of PBM Practices

Drug Topics

Health care professionals, industry leaders, and politicians gathered for a virtual roundtable to discuss the state of the PBM industry.

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Statins Could Potentially Slow Deterioration of Cognitive Function for Those With Alzheimer Disease

Pharmacy Times

Due to the observational nature of the study, the study authors said they cannot determine causal relationships between statins and cognitive decline for patients with Alzheimer disease.

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Inside a push to create an NIH office for post-infection chronic illness

STAT

When the White House released President Biden’s 2025 budget requests this week, funding for biomedical research was stagnant. The more conservative wishlist from the president acknowledges a reduced appetite in Congress for non-defense government spending.  But some disease groups, along with their research allies, are undeterred. A growing number are calling for increased research funding and the creation of a new body at the National Institutes of Health to study chronic conditions

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With Pfizer struggling in 2023, CEO Bourla hit with 35% pay cut to $21.6M

Fierce Pharma

Pfizer knew 2023 was going to be a challenging year of transition. But even the drugmaker was surprised by the plummeting demand for its COVID-19 products, missing badly on its 2023 guidance. | After a difficult year for Pfizer, in which its share price fell by 44%, CEO Albert Bourla’s compensation fell by 35% from $33 million in 2022 to $21.6 million in 2023.

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Position Your Pharmacy for Expansion

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.

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Under new management, and under the cloud of the Change hack, HIMSS24 kicks off in Orlando next week

Fierce Healthcare

One of the largest health IT conferences, HIMSS24, will kick off in Orlando on Monday as a revamped trade show following a deal with Informa Markets last fall. | One of the largest health IT conferences, HIMSS24, will kick off in Orlando on Monday as a revamped trade show following a deal with Informa Markets last fall.

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Cannabinoids show promise in acute migraine clinical trial

pharmaphorum

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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India’s Tata Institute develops tablet for cancer recurrence prevention

Pharmaceutical Technology

India’s Tata Institute has developed a tablet combining resveratrol and copper that has the potential to prevent the recurrence of cancer.

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Stealing With Our Eyes Open

Drug Topics

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

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Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy May Be the First, Only Clinically Effective Treatment for Long COVID

Pharmacy Times

“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+: Medicare couldn’t cover Wegovy for weight loss. But now that it’s also a heart drug, the door is open

STAT

WASHINGTON — Novo Nordisk’s newly won permission to market the heart benefits of its obesity drug Wegovy could provide a backdoor way to expand access to the drug for people on Medicare, experts told STAT. Currently, Medicare is prohibited by law from covering medications for obesity treatment alone. While companies that manufacture wildly popular anti-obesity medications and their allies haven’t been successful in lobbying Congress to change the law , the Food and Drug

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What the FDA's New Dosage Guidance Means for the Future of Clinical Research

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.

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Opinion: No parent who has seen the children I’ve treated for measles would refuse a vaccine

STAT

Over the past year, I have watched many children die of measles. In the final stages, little lungs, filled with fluid and racked with inflammation, struggle for oxygen. The victims breathe faster and faster, gasping for air until, exhausted, they stop.

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Rigid rules at methadone clinics are jeopardizing patients’ path to recovery from opioid addiction

STAT

DETROIT — Every morning, Rebecca Smith, nursing a surgically repaired knee, carefully walks down the hallway of her brutalist brick apartment building, takes the elevator one floor to the lobby, and negotiates the sharply angled driveway outside. There, she waits for an Uber to take her to the last place she wants to go: her methadone clinic.

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STAT+: UnitedHealth is on a buying spree of outpatient surgery centers

STAT

UnitedHealth Group quietly acquired dozens of outpatient facilities in 2023, with a particular focus on surgery centers, according to a STAT review of company financial filings. Those acquisitions — nearly all of which the company never announced — build on the network of some 90,000 physicians UnitedHealth Group has amassed in recent years.

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Study: Gilead antiviral drug shows promise as a treatment for Ebola Sudan

STAT

A new study suggests the antiviral drug obeldesivir may be effective in curing Ebola Sudan infections, for which there are currently no approved vaccines or treatments. Scientists at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston tested the drug, made by Gilead, in primates, starting treatment 24 hours after the animals were given what should have been a lethal dose of Sudan ebolavirus by intramuscular injection.

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5 Reasons to Upgrade Your Pharmacy Management Software

Are you still using workarounds to manage your daily operations? To achieve peak performance, it's time to explore other options for specialty and infusion pharmacy software. Streamline pharmacy operations and improve clinical performance with automated processing, real-time data exchange, and electronic decision support. Download this helpful infographic to: Drive efficiency and patient adherence from referral receipt to delivery and ongoing care – all with our Pharmacy Cloud.

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Girls are starting puberty earlier than ever. For some, that comes with major mental health risks

STAT

Zaria was just 9 years old when a nurse practitioner delivered news that rocked her world: The young girl was already showing signs of puberty development, and she was on track to get her period within the next year. Surprised by this timeline, Zaria’s mother, Chanell, worked with a pediatrician to plan healthier meals, hoping that managing her daughter’s weight gain could give her a couple more precious years with her childhood unchanged.

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RSV monoclonal Beyfortus was 90% effective at preventing hospitalizations in children this winter: CDC

STAT

A new monoclonal antibody product to protect against respiratory syncytial virus was 90% effective at preventing little children from being hospitalized with RSV, according to new data from the first season it was in use. The data , published Thursday in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention publication, looked at how well Beyfortus worked in the children whose parents managed to secure a scarce dose of the drug.

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Florida health officials provide scant details on measles cases, worrying health experts

STAT

On Sunday, public health officials in two Michigan counties warned their residents that they may have been exposed to measles. In Wayne County , an adult who had contracted the virus abroad had been in health-related settings in Dearborn on two days last week — two urgent care clinics, a CVS pharmacy, and a hospital emergency department. Health officials in neighboring Washtenaw County issued a similar alert about a different case — also an adult, also infected abroad —

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Microplastics found in blood vessels linked to greater risk of heart problems, study finds

STAT

Micro and nanoplastics, tiny pieces of plastic scattered throughout the environment, have been increasingly found to be able to enter the body, raising questions about where they end up and how they affect people’s health. In a new study, researchers say they have for the first time detected these plastic pieces inside fatty plaques that accumulate in blood vessels and linked them to an increased rate of heart problems.

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STAT+: Nursing home owners can hide nearly two-thirds of their profits, new study shows

STAT

A new study shows that some nursing homes are shunting the majority of their profits off of their own books and into less-visible corners of their owners’ pockets. The practice makes the nursing homes look poorer than they really are, the study’s authors wrote, which seems to bolster the industry’s arguments to Congress that it can’t meet certain proposed quality standards or handle potential Medicare payment cuts.

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How the U.S. is sabotaging its best tools to prevent deaths in the opioid epidemic

STAT

The opioid overdose epidemic has burned through the U.S. for nearly 30 years. Yet for all that time, the country has had tools that are highly effective at preventing overdose deaths: methadone and buprenorphine. These medicines are cheap and easy to distribute. People who take them use illicit drugs at far lower rates, and are at far lower risk of overdose or death.

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Watch: Why fentanyl withdrawal is agony and how medication can prevent it

STAT

Over 2 million Americans have opioid use disorder, according to some estimates. Illicit opioids such as heroin and fentanyl were responsible for over 80,000 U.S. overdose deaths in 2023. Despite the known risks, these drugs are notoriously hard to stop using — due in large part to how debilitating withdrawal can be.

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Covid-19 increases risk of developing autoimmune disease, but vaccination helps, large study shows

STAT

Having Covid-19 increases a person’s risk of developing an autoimmune disease in the year after infection, a large study out of South Korea and Japan reports, but vaccination helps decrease that risk. Researchers used the medical records of 10 million Korean and 12 million Japanese adults to see whether those who had Covid were more likely to be diagnosed with autoimmune inflammatory rheumatic diseases, or AIRDs, in the year following infection.

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STAT+: Harvard longevity scientist sparks furor with claim about reversing aging in dogs

STAT

Renowned Harvard University geneticist and longevity researcher David Sinclair recently made an astonishing assertion: Scientists had developed the first pill — well, a soft, beef-flavored chew — “proven to reverse aging” in dogs. Which miracle molecules delivered this supposed scientific breakthrough, he didn’t say.

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STAT+: Small studies offer hope CAR-T can fight an aggressive brain cancer

STAT

A series of new studies are raising hopes that CAR-T , a process in which treatments are made by genetically editing a patient’s own white blood cells, can eventually be used to treat an incurable and deadly type of brain cancer, called glioblastoma multiforme, or GBM. In the most dramatic result, from a three-person study conducted by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital, a 72-year-old man saw his tumor shrink 18.5% in just two days and then decrease further over the next two mo

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STAT+: Novo Nordisk’s diabetes drug Ozempic cuts risk of kidney disease progression, trial shows

STAT

LONDON — Novo Nordisk’s diabetes medication Ozempic cut the risk of patients developing advanced kidney disease or dying from kidney or heart complications, the company said Tuesday, adding to the evidence the wildly popular drug has broader health benefits for patients beyond addressing their diabetes. Overall, Ozempic lowered the risk of progression of patients’ kidney disease and of related health events by 24% versus placebo, according to the topline results.

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STAT+: In stunning outcome, Amylyx’s ALS drug fails large clinical trial

STAT

Amylyx Pharmaceuticals said Friday that its treatment for ALS, called Relyvrio, failed to provide any benefit for patients in a large clinical trial — a stunning outcome that now has the company considering a voluntary withdrawal of the approved medicine from the market. “This is really hard for us, and it’s really hard for our team who care so much, but it’s so much harder for people with ALS and their families, and we have to keep that perspective,” said a so

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STAT+: Change Healthcare cyber attack outage could persist for weeks, UnitedHealth Group executive suggests

STAT

The outage caused by the Change Healthcare cyberattack could last weeks, a top UnitedHealth executive suggested in a Tuesday conference call with hospital cybersecurity officers, according to a recording obtained by STAT. UnitedHealth Group Chief Operating Officer Dirk McMahon said the company is setting up a loan program to help providers who can’t submit insurance claims while Change is offline.

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What the brains of song birds can teach us about human stuttering

STAT

A symphony of synapses fires every time a songbird sings. For Erich Jarvis, a neurobiologist at Rockefeller University, the neural pathways he finds particularly interesting inside a birds’ brain are those that enable the bird to make new sounds from listening to their environment. This is an ability known as vocal learning, and is perhaps most notably exhibited when a parrot mimics a person’s speech (or profanity).

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FDA approves first MASH drug: Madrigal's Rezdiffra breaks ground in notorious biopharma graveyard

Fierce Pharma

The decades-long wait for an effective treatment for metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH) has ended, as the FDA has approved the first drug for the fatty liver disease. | The decades-long wait for an effective treatment for metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH) has ended. The FDA has approved Madrigal's resmetirom under the brand name Rezdiffra as the first drug for the fatty liver disease.

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In a first, fetal cell organoids generated from amniotic fluid, new study reports

STAT

As a fetus develops, its body is bathed in amniotic fluid: a warm, salty soup of nutrients, hormones, and antibodies produced by its mother. And into that fluid, a fetus is constantly sloughing off or peeing out cells, which provide genetic material that doctors can pull out with a needle and examine for signs of disease in a process called amniocentesis.

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CDC advisory panel says people 65 and older should get a Covid spring booster shot

STAT

An expert panel advising the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccines on Wednesday recommended that people 65 and older should get an additional Covid-19 vaccine shot this spring. The recommendation was approved by CDC Director Mandy Cohen, allowing the United States to join Canada and the United Kingdom in offering a spring booster this year to people at high risk of severe disease if they contract Covid.

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‘Brain fog’ is one of Covid-19’s most daunting symptoms. A new study measures its impact

STAT

Of all the lingering symptoms of long Covid , difficulty focusing and thinking, known as brain fog , may be the most frightening and baffling. A new study published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, which looks at how much cognition is impaired in the months after a coronavirus infection, shows that Covid-19’s impact can be measured in the equivalent of IQ points.

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Opinion: Medicare Advantage is bad for patients and bad for investors

STAT

In 2023, enrollment in Medicare Advantage, the version of Medicare run by private insurers, surpassed 50% of eligible beneficiaries for the very first time. Going by this headline, or perhaps the predictable flood of advertisements for plans during the fall’s open enrollment period, you might be fooled into thinking 2023 was MA’s best year yet.

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STAT+: White House is told the big three PBMs are ‘everything wrong with this industry’

STAT

As part of its battle to blunt the growing cost of medicines, the White House on Monday held a so-called listening session in hopes of finding ways to rein in big pharmacy benefit managers, which occupy an opaque but crucial role in pharmaceutical pricing in the U.S. The gathering resembled something of a fact-finding mission as a small group of policymakers and business people briefly shared their experiences dealing with the largest industry middlemen, who negotiate with drugmakers on behalf o

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