GLG News in Healthcare

Cell Genesys is basically stopping work on GVAX inview of failure in two trials. The cause of the failure is not readily apparent.

This collaboration will be very successful: the trial involving 20 000 patients will take a long time to complete. During the trial utilization of stents will not change. Upon completion of the trial it will become even more obvious that 2 years of "blood thinning" is better than 1 year for stents potency rates. The complications of prolonged "blood thinning", however, will promote search for...

Amiodarone is still one of the best drugs for atrial fibrillation despite "rare incidence" of cirrhosis, lung fibrosis and now "rare muscle injury".

Utilization of a device in a setting of marginal data is not driven by that data, but by the reimbursement rates. Medtronc might loose the battle, but stents are still winning the war.

Targeted therapy for cancer is the new trend Targeted therapy will allow the use of more expensive drugs to be more practical We need to focus on hitting a target more than ever

There has been distubing trends in nationalized health care in regrds to cancer care Recently the UK made an absolutely shocking decision on renal cancer therapy, as it has in other cancers in the past Hopefully through advances in predicting cancer therapy outcomes via microarray etc. we can keep progressing as we have over the past decade with targeted therapy

This plan to start a large trial to determine the optimal antiplatelet therapy. after [drug-eluting] stent implantation makes sense both scientifically and economically for the involved stent companies (Johnson & Johnson, Boston Scientific, Medtronic and Abbott). Sanofi-Aventis and Bristol Myers Squibb, who market clopidogrel (Plavix) are likely also interested to have more precise data out...

Even after the trillion dollars which the federal government has had to spend to prop up the nation's financial system during the past month, it still has some real money left to subsidize the costs of physicians in smaller practices willing to implement electronic records.  With electronic records as a necessary ingredient in any healthcare reform package next year regardless of who occupies...

St. John's Wort has long been promoted as "herbal Prozac", claiming the added benefits of being natural and affordable. If fact, reading the proponents' comments, one would think St. John's Wort is health food.   The concentration of hypericin, the key pharmacologically active constituent in commercial St. John's Wort preparaations, is highly variable. One study known to this author...

Being able to select the right drug for the righ patient benefits everyone, most importantly patients, but also the drug company.  Developing drugs specifically for a small, but targeted population likley means you get a much higher level of efficacy for a smaller population making the risk-benefit ratio of the drug much better.  Ultimately, this benefits pharma/biotech companies by having...