GLG News in Healthcare

Healthways reported lower than expected earnings in its current quarter and analysts are pointing to a tightening in the healthcare markets and the fact that Healthways products are expensive. Does this really make sense?

This is the 4th in its class of oral antiemetics to control acute phase CINV.  It is likely to be cost-prohibitive in the company of generical ondansetron.  Palonosetron's control of delayed CINV in the IV formulation makes it the better choice among it's class; therefore, losing this indication in the oral form will make it less attractive to use.

Chronic ITP is not all that uncommon and becomes a quality of life issue with chronic steroid use as well as agents that are normaly used in neoplasia and even derivatives of male hormones.

This past week for the first time, the federal government posted on its  Hospital Compare web site the actual death rates for hospitals treating patients with three conditions:  heart attack, heart failure and pneumonia.  In the past, the feds had only indicated whether these death rates were higher, lower or about what could be expected given patients' pretreatment severity of...

Any new drug being marketed is always slow to gain popularity clinical practice until time and patient tested.  These new health alerts in association with Byetta will most likely make doctors more wary about starting Byetta in a patient who has underlying risk factors for pancreatitis. This article is good but does not address how long the patients were on Byetta before symptoms began. ...

1.  Merck and GSK are pushing too much for Cerival cancer vaccine advertisement. 2.  Merck ( Gardasil), and GSK( cervarix) are very tiny age applications, but real disease start after 20, so early vaccination is no use, but Pap smear is more helpful 3. So drug marker push to cancer vaccine lead is  only media hype.

Because equivalent results were shown, there will be no change in stent placement volumes.

The recent publication of new cases of pancreatitis that are occurring in patients taking Byetta (exenatide) can't be good for Amylin/Lilly. While Byetta and investigational GLP-1 analogs are still very viable therapeutics for Type 2 Diabetes, prescribers will have to reassess the risk-benefit ratio for many patients given the new information. The long-acting form of Byetta (LAR) may suffer the most...

Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Mass., the University of Illinois at Chicago and the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. scientists say they've found an efficient way to make red blood cells from human embryonic stem cells. Impreesive!

1. BiovaxID®  is a personalized, patient-specific therapeutic vaccine designed to stimulate the patient's own immune system to recognize and destroy cancerous B-cells that may remain in the body or may arise after the patient has been treated with chemotherapy. 2. Unlike many other approaches to treating non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, BiovaxID is designed to kill only cancerous B-cells   3....