Author: Peter

Eli Lilly…was cleared of liability in the first trial involving claims that its antidepressant Cymbalta caused severe withdrawal symptoms, including suicidal thoughts and electric shock-like sensations,…Eli Lilly has been sued by roughly 250 plaintiffs who say that the company downplayed warnings about symptoms that can occur when patients quit the popular drug, which has annual sales of about $3.9 billion.

…US regulator awards iclaprim expedited QIDP (fast-track qualified infectious disease product) status, a former FDA antibiotics expert says the scheme boosts antibiotics without enough evidence for efficacy…This drug should not be developed further…the drug industry is forgetting past lessons about what constitutes good evidence…

Ashley Talamo, Publisher: Pharmacy Times...(PTNN) This weekly video program highlights the latest in pharmacy news, product news, and more. (video)

Diabetes costs are rising at a baffling rate... costs just increase.

Here are some notable trends

• Costs rose 150 percent for six popular, brand-name diabetes drugs in the past five years. Two of these drugs rose in price more than 250 percent.
• In 2012, the cost of treating diabetes was $245 billion.
• The spend on insulin and other diabetes medications is projected to rise 18.3 percent over the next three years – a rate that’s 60 times greater than the income growth rate of 0.3 percent across all households.

California women who have long had to schedule a doctor’s appointment for a birth control prescription will be able to go straight to the pharmacy for the contraception… state law, passed in 2013 with plans to be implemented in October, gives licensed pharmacists authorization to prescribe self-administered hormonal contraceptives,...SB 493, also allows pharmacists to prescribe nicotine replacement products,…travel medication, and gives pharmacists status as health care providers.

Evotec and Sanofi are launching a strategic collaboration in diabetes drug development that could be worth as much as $330m ...goal … will be to develop a beta cell replacement therapy based on...beta cells derived from...stem cells.…use of human stem cells in drug discovery and development…will increasingly shift the landscape from symptomatic treatments to disease-modifying therapies....

AmerisourceBergen Corp. has launched the AmerisourceBergen Foundation, a nonprofit charitable organization that… focuses on health and wellness initiatives that improve patient outcomes, including pharmaceutical accessibility programs, pharmaceutical adherence programs and health improvement research…. support for K-12 education, nursing programs, pharmacy programs and needs-based scholarships for youth...

While the breach did not result in substantial harm...it highlighted the susceptibility of FDA’s network to attacks and raised questions about the adequacy of FDA’s information security program…The vulnerability of information collected and maintained by the agency is of prime importance to many in the pharma and biotech industries because FDA has the legal obligation to protect companies’ trade secrets and confidential commercial information.

Allergan, which is selling its generics business to focus on branded drugs and aesthetics products, aims to acquire or license products that have already shown promise in studies, and leave the riskier discovery process to small biotechs and academic researchers...."The best way for us to participate in discovery is investing in a more 'virtual' sense, than actually building and running our own labs,"..

..realities of having children is that it is very likely you will also have pets…with pets come responsibilities…such as...taking your cat to the veterinarian…my vet provides access to a health information web portal for my pets,…it was not until the recent release of proposed revisions to Stage 2 Meaningful Use requirements…that I realized perhaps web portal designers for human electronic health records could learn a thing or two from what I know is already available for pets...