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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FDA 177

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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Hospitals 145

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 17, 2024

One-year data continued to support a more convenient, injectable version of Roche’s blockbuster multiple sclerosis (MS) drug Ocrevus ahead of an FDA decision, the Swiss pharma said. | One-year data continued to support a more convenient, injectable version of Roche’s blockbuster multiple sclerosis drug Ocrevus ahead of an FDA decision, the Swiss pharma said.

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FDA 132

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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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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Documentation 134

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 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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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 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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Documentation 144

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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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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Insurance 145

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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FDA 145

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Pharmacy Management Software

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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STAT

APRIL 8, 2024

The country’s biggest hospital chain, HCA Healthcare , told the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services it doled out almost $1 billion more in financial assistance to needy patients than it reported on its financial statement in 2022, helping the enormously profitable company extract billions of dollars from taxpayer-funded programs. It’s normal for hospital systems to report more charity care — free and discounted care provided to low-income patients — in their an

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Hospitals 143

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

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 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 5, 2024

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urged medical practitioners on Friday to be on the lookout for people who might have contracted H5N1 bird flu from cows. The agency also urged state health departments to rapidly assess any suspected human cases, and recommended that dairy farms with confirmed or suspected outbreaks require workers to use personal protective equipment.

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STAT

APRIL 5, 2024

News that H5N1 avian influenza has breached another mammalian species — this time dairy cows — has taken the flu science community aback. Though cows previously had been seen to be susceptible to human flu viruses , and could be experimentally infected with H5 in a lab, the absence of cow involvement until now in H5’s nearly 30-year history lulled scientists into thinking the species was outside the virus’s remit.

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STAT

APRIL 5, 2024

Dogs, our sunny, selfless shadows, crave little more than a daily walk, a treat or two, and their human’s happiness. But increasingly, their own happiness is the topic of concern in veterinarian offices, dog parks, and internet forums. Prozac prescriptions for dogs are on the rise, veterinarians across the country acknowledge, along with a myriad of cheaper generic mood stabilizers sold for humans but applied to pets’ separation anxiety, socialization fears, biting habits, or other

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STAT

APRIL 10, 2024

Vertex Pharmaceuticals will buy Alpine Immune Sciences, a maker of protein-based medicines that harness the immune system, for $4.9 billion, the companies announced Wednesday. It is the largest acquisition in Vertex’s history. The acquisition gives Vertex a drug called povetacicept, which has shown promise in treating IgA nephropathy (IgAN), an autoimmune disorder of the kidney that can lead to end-stage renal disease and affects 130,000 people in the U.S.

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STAT

APRIL 3, 2024

The booming class of GLP-1 drugs that includes Ozempic and Wegovy is not only effective for diabetes and obesity, but is also showing early potential to help with conditions involving the brain, like mental health disorders , Alzheimer’s, and even, as new study results suggest — Parkinson’s disease. In a Phase 2 trial, patients with early Parkinson’s disease taking an older GLP-1 diabetes drug called lixisenatide experienced no worsening of motor symptoms over a year,

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STAT

APRIL 8, 2024

The world’s first recipient of a kidney transplant from a genetically modified pig experienced a rejection episode before recovering and leaving the hospital last week, a Massachusetts General Hospital doctor told STAT. But in his first few days back at home in Weymouth, Mass., the patient — 62-year-old Richard Slayman — had shown no further signs of organ distress.

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Hospitals 141

STAT

APRIL 9, 2024

Teenagers don’t get arthritis. That’s what Tiffany Peterson kept hearing as that dreadful feeling in her 17-year-old wrists and knees grew excruciating. So she tried to ignore it, popping over-the-counter pain medicines and keeping her head in science textbooks, her hands full in the evening with extracurriculars and a half dozen younger siblings to care for.

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Insurance 140

STAT

APRIL 16, 2024

WASHINGTON – In the last decade, Americans have been sickened by salmonella from cucumbers, listeria from Mexican-style cheese, and E. coli from romaine lettuce. Now, it would seem that Washington is finally getting serious about making sure the Food and Drug Administration has the power to promptly investigate and respond to foodborne outbreaks.

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STAT

APRIL 7, 2024

SAN DIEGO — For decades, the Food and Drug Administration’s accelerated approval pathway has helped companies get drugs for serious unmet medical needs to patients — and the market — sooner. But about half of cancer drugs approved via this route fail to improve patient survival or quality of life in subsequent clinical trials after more than five years of follow-up , according to new findings presented Sunday at the American Association for Cancer Research annual meet

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FDA 141

STAT

APRIL 11, 2024

It’s no surprise in today’s corrosive political environment that trust in government is near an all-time low. That’s a big problem. Communities with more trust during the Covid-19 pandemic had fewer deaths and less economic devastation. In many countries — notably the United States — the pandemic dissolved trust between parts of the community and the public health system.

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Communication 137

STAT

APRIL 1, 2024

Texas health officials reported Monday that an individual who had been in contact with cattle has contracted H5N1 avian flu, only the second case ever recorded in the U.S. The person had contact with dairy cattle that are believed to have been infected with the virus, the Texas Department of State Health Services said in a statement. It went on to say that the individual’s only symptom is eye inflammation — infection of the conjunctiva, the tissue surrounding the eye.

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STAT

APRIL 1, 2024

Hospitals performing pelvic and other sensitive exams for training purposes without patients’ explicit consent, including on anesthetized patients, won’t be eligible for Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement, according to new guidance released on Monday by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

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Hospitals 145

STAT

APRIL 1, 2024

Since the U.S. surgeon general’s 2023 advisory on social media and teen mental health, public concern has skyrocketed around adolescents’ digital lives. Major news organizations and even state governments have pinned social media apps as addictive , dangerous, and the cause of the youth mental health crisis. In turn, calls to ban teens from social media apps have started to emerge, with mixed reception from policymakers nationwide.

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STAT

APRIL 1, 2024

Over the past few weeks, Medicare Advantage insurers demanded that the Biden administration give them higher payment rates for next year. The government’s data on how much people were using health care didn’t match their own data, insurers and lobbyists griped — and therefore they wouldn’t be paid enough to cover those costs.

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