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The cost of insulin for treating type 1 diabetes in the United States nearly doubled over a five-year period, underscoring a national outcry over rising drug prices...A person with type 1 diabetes incurred annual insulin costs of $5,705, on average, in 2016. The average cost was roughly half that at $2,864 per patient in 2012...the jump in spending was driven primarily by higher insulin prices overall and, to a lesser extent, a shift toward more expensive insulin products. Average daily insulin use rose only 3 percent over the same five-year period...The findings come amid new outrage over the cost of prescription drugs in the United States, the highest in the world...

A tiny sliver of elastic material swims along inside a narrow tube, coiling up and changing shape in response to the thickness of fluid and the contours of the tube around it as it moves towards its goal...The miniature robot - the bacteria-inspired brainchild of a team of scientists in Switzerland seeking new methods to deliver drugs to diseased tissue - is designed to wend its way through blood vessels and other systems in the body...The tiny soft microswimmer robot they have developed is a few millimeters in length and made using a folding technique similar to the Japanese art of origami, helping it adapt to the environment around it...

The European and UK pharma industry have called for preparations to ensure that patients will have access to their medications in case of a no-deal Brexit by 30 March 2019...The call follows parliament’s rejection of Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit withdrawal plan...the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations highlighted ‘real, tangible and immediate threats’ to patients and public health in the UK as well as the EU...“Now is the time for policy makers in the UK and the EU to put politics aside and put measures in place to prevent patients being harmed by the consequences of Brexit...“In particular from disruption to the supply of medicines including from transport delays at the border and where the development, manufacture, packaging, safety testing and regulation of the medicine no longer benefits from mutual recognition.”

The Louisiana Department of Health is seeking a drug manufacturing partner for unrestricted access to curative hepatitis C treatments for Medicaid and incarcerated patients. Rather than pay the partner by prescription, the state would agree to pay a subscription fee similar to the Netflix model of paying a fixed monthly cost rather than paying per movie... The state said the plan is an attempt to help end the hep C epidemic in Louisiana. At least 39,000 people in the state's Medicaid program or in its prisons have the disease... fewer than 3% of Medicaid patients in Louisiana with hep C were treated last year. State officials blamed the lack of treatment on high drug prices.

Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc will pay $269.2 million to settle two whistleblower lawsuits accusing it of civil fraud for overbilling federal healthcare programs over a decade, the U.S. Department of Justice said...The pharmacy chain will pay $209.2 million to resolve claims it improperly billed Medicare, Medicaid and other federal programs from 2006 to 2017 for hundreds of thousands of insulin pens it dispensed to patients it knew did not need them...Walgreens will also pay $60 million to resolve claims it overcharged Medicaid from 2008 to 2017 by failing to disclose and charge the discount drug prices it offered the public through its Prescription Savings Club program...Two pharmacists filed the original complaint concerning the insulin pens in July 2015. A copy of that complaint could not immediately be obtained on Tuesday...Marc Baker, who worked for Walgreens for a decade as a pharmacy manager in Florida, filed the original complaint concerning the drug price discounts in January 2012.

Routes to making life-saving medications and other pharmaceutical compounds are among the most carefully protected trade secrets in global industry. Building on recent work programming computers to identify synthetic pathways leading to pharmaceutically complex molecules, researchers in Poland and South Korea have unveiled computerized methods to suggest only synthetic strategies that bypass patent-protected aspects of essential drugs...When we started this project, I was somewhat skeptical that the machine would find any viable synthetic alternatives--after all, these are blockbuster drugs worth gazillions of dollars, and I was sure that the respective companies had covered the patent space so densely that no loopholes remained. It turns out that the loopholes are there, and we can find new retrosynthetic pathways that circumvent the patents entirely."( Bartosz Grzybowski )...the researchers hope that their software will aid pharmaceutical companies in better protecting their intellectual property and, simultaneously, will help accelerate research and development in organic chemistry by supplying synthetic routes that differ from standard approaches.

Laura Joszt, Managing Editor at The American Journal of Managed Care. Welcome to This Week in Managed Care from the Managed Markets News Network

The world is experiencing a superbug problem: strains of bacteria are rapidly becoming resistant to modern drugs, making them harder to treat...However, a new study found that a significant number of antibiotics prescription are not appropriate. Researchers warned that their findings suggest that experts might have underestimated the rate of overprescription, which gives rise to superbugs...The analysis revealed that 23.2 percent of the prescribed antibiotics were not appropriate, 35.5 percent were potentially appropriate, and 28.5 percent were not associated with a diagnosis which might also mean that they were inappropriate...Roughly 2.2 million of the 14.6 million adults involved in the study had at least one antibiotic prescription that is unnecessary to treat their ailments...

Researchers are reporting a link between doctor-targeted marketing of opioid products and the increase in U.S. deaths from overdoses...In a county-by-county analysis, they found that when drug companies increased their opioid marketing budgets by just $5.29 per 1,000 population, the number of opioid prescriptions written by doctors went up by 82 percent and the opioid death rate was 9 percent higher a year later...“It really doesn’t take much marketing to increase the number of deaths,” lead author Dr. Scott Hadland...Jordan Trecki of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration warns that the new analysis only addresses part of the problem...“As the opioid epidemic grows, it is evolving beyond prescription medications and heroin to involve illicitly produced fentanyl, fentanyl-related substances and other opioids, either alone or in combination,”...

Nicole Grassano, PTNN, Pharmacy Week in Review, this weekly video program provides our readers with an in-depth review of the latest news, product approvals, FDA rulings and more.